House of Representatives: Democrats in da house!

[fraurosena]

The GOP is really setting America up for a fascist dictatorship. And they're not being shy about it either. They should rename themselves as the FOP: The Fascist Oligarch-paid Party.

[fraurosena]

Nice try at deflection, Mnuchin. But nobody's saying he should release his tax returns to the public, which is indeed (still) a voluntary act. Congress is demanding to review them. That's something they are allowed to do, and under law you are obligated to hand them over to Congress. 

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Ted Lieu is awsome:

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

I just want to thank you all for all the informative posts every day.  I see stuff and then research or just helps put news into context.  

You've made me a more informed person which I’d appreciate more if everything I learned didn’t make me want to drive my car off a building into a pit of fire.  ♥️

[fraurosena]

Wait... what?!

 

[fraurosena]

Boom. Ouch.

Gotta love AOC.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Don't fuck with Auntie Maxine

Video here

Spoiler

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) engaged in a fierce clash Tuesday, squaring off amid rising antagonism between the White House and congressional Democrats.

Their disagreement appeared to be over something innocuous — how long Mnuchin would continue to testify at a hearing — but Waters refused to budge and Mnuchin became furious when he wasn’t dismissed more than three hours after the hearing began.

When Waters told Mnuchin he was free to get up and leave, Mnuchin appeared nervous, unsure what that would mean.

“Please dismiss everybody,” Mnuchin said, he then mispronounced the wooden mallet she held in her hand.

“I believe you are supposed to take the gravel [sic] and bang it,” he said.

Waters snapped back at him immediately.

“Please do not instruct me as to how I am to conduct this committee,” she said.

House Democrats spent much of the day peppering Mnuchin with a range of questions. His testimony before Waters’s committee was his second House hearing of the day.

He fielded numerous questions about whether he would release Trump’s tax returns (he wouldn’t say whether he would), and he also was asked about his personal ethics disclosures and the treatment of Russian companies.

As the afternoon hearing dragged on, Mnuchin said he needed to leave by 5 p.m. so that he could attend a meeting with an important foreign leader. He would later reveal it was a senior official from Bahrain to discuss “national security.”

Waters didn’t appear impressed.

“We’re all late all the time, unfortunately,” she said. “We’re all pressed for time, and I do get it.”

A number of the Democrats and Republicans on the committee still had not been able to ask Mnuchin questions, and she wanted Mnuchin to agree to come back twice in May for more time. He seemed exasperated at the request and wouldn’t agree to it. It was 5:15 p.m., and he said his meeting was scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m.

“When the Republicans [controlled the House of Representatives last year], they did not treat the secretary of the Treasury this way,” Mnuchin said. “So if this is the way you want to treat me, then I will rethink whether I would voluntarily come back here later to testify, which I have offered to do.”

Waters again said Mnuchin could leave whenever he wanted. He wouldn’t get up until she adjourned the committee, and grew angrier and angrier.

“You are instructing me, you are ordering me to stay here,” he said.

Mnuchin said no treasury secretary had testified before Congress for longer than three hours and 15 minutes in the past six years. He seemed to anticipate that this was going to be an issue, as he had a notecard in his pocket with the length of testimony for each treasury secretary over the past six years.

Waters swatted away the precedent.

“This is a new way, and it’s a new day,” she said. “And it's a new chair, and I have the gavel. At this point, if you wish to leave, you may.”

Mnuchin ultimately agreed to stay. He did leave at 5:30, and by that point he seemed to have cooled off a bit.

“Thank you and I look forward to being back in May; we’ll work on a date,” Mnuchin said as the hearing ended.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

His fear is almost palpable. This is what a man looks like who knows he's committing a federal crime: lying to Congress.

 

[smittykins]

Whenever a reference is made to AOC being a former bartender, I think of a line from the 1970’s TV show “Chico And The Man”:  Ed Brown(The Man)made a comment about a cocktail waitress becoming President, and Della(the landlady, played by Della Reese)retorted, “If a peanut farmer can become President, why not a cocktail waitress?”

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm guessing the milk dud will be suing The Onion next:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘Such a puff piece’: Nancy Pelosi unleashed on Trump in a ‘60 Minutes’ interview, and the president isn’t happy"

Spoiler

President Trump lashed out at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) Sunday night on Twitter following a CBS “60 Minutes” interview during which she recounted standing up to him and reiterated her opinion that he is unfit for office and knows it.

“There’s nobody in the country who knows better that he should not be president of the United States than Donald Trump,” Pelosi told CBS’s Lesley Stahl in a roughly 14-minute segment that aired Sunday. In the wide-ranging interview, Pelosi touted Democrats’ achievements in their first 100 days in control of the House of Representatives while also discussing last December’s heated Oval Office showdown over funding for Trump’s border wall, her now-famous State of the Union clap and the power she holds in her current position.

Pelosi’s comments did not appear to go over well with Trump.

“Such a ‘puff piece’ on Nancy Pelosi by @60minutes, yet her leadership has passed no meaningful Legislation,” he tweeted, accusing Democrats of only investigating “crimes that they instigated & committed.” It is unclear exactly what “crimes” Trump was referring to, but in the past he has suggested Hillary Clinton and Democrats be investigated for colluding with Russia.

“The Mueller No Collusion decision wasn’t even discussed-and she was a disaster at W.H.,” Trump added, referencing last year’s fiery border wall spat.

The scathing tweet is a departure from Trump’s usual approach to Pelosi, one of his most vocal critics. Despite his history of feuding with other high-ranking Democrats on Twitter, Trump has seldom directly taken aim at Pelosi. Just last month, she appeared to win favor with the president when she said in an interview with The Washington Post Magazine that she was “not for impeachment,” adding “it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”

A spokesman for Pelosi had no comment Sunday, but the speaker’s team was quick to respond to the president on Twitter.

“Thanks for watching!” the tweet said.

During Sunday’s interview, Stahl did press Pelosi about critics who have said “it seems like right now nothing is getting done” with her at the helm.

“One of the complaints we’ve heard is that you don’t reach across the aisle,” Stahl said. “You pass things, whatever it is dies in the Senate.”

Pelosi pushed back, telling Stahl firmly, “Nothing’s died,” before shifting the focus to her power as speaker to set the agenda in the House, and how she has wielded it in the past 100 days.

“We didn’t have a speaker who would bring a gun bill to the floor,” she said. “We didn’t have a speaker who would bring a dreamers issue to the floor. We do now, and that’s a very big difference. The power of the speaker is awesome.”

When the conversation inevitably turned back to Trump, Pelosi did not shy away from criticizing the president or talking about the times she has stood her ground against him. The interview began with her once again pushing for the president’s taxes and the full report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III on Russian interference in the 2016 election to be released.

“You’ve said, ‘If someone’s ripping your face off. You rip their face off,’” Stahl said, after pointing out that Pelosi seems to be “one of the very, very few people who have stood up to [Trump] and won.”

“Oh yeah, I would do that,” Pelosi responded. “Yeah, I probably said that . . . They just have to know, you throw a punch, you better take a punch.”

In recent months, Pelosi has made headlines for her public interactions with Trump, often going viral as a result. As The Post’s Colby Itkowitz reported in December, she emerged from the White House meeting on border security “not some wilted flower, but a symbol of a woman who doesn’t have time for male posturing.” Then, at February’s State of the Union, she sarcastically clapped at Trump after he called for rejecting “politics of revenge, resistance and retribution” and was crowned “Queen of Condescending Applause.”

“This is your new branding of Nancy Pelosi, kind of like a giant slayer almost,” Stahl remarked.

“I happen to be a manifestation of the women power that is coming forth now, but only one manifestation,” Pelosi said.

She continued: “As our founders said, when they declared independence and established a new nation, ‘The times have found us.’ . . . The times have found us, not because we’re so great, but because of the urgency of the situation that our country faces because of the situation in the White House.”

When asked how she would describe Trump, Pelosi’s answer was blunt.

“I think that he describes himself on a daily basis,” she said, noting that Trump is aware “he should not be president."

"But I respect the office he holds and he’s not worth the trouble of saying, ‘You’re so horrible we can’t work together.’ No, we need to work together.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Howl]

Love me some AOC! 

 

[milkteeth]

This video is gorgeous, and absolutely fills me with hope...especially on Earth Day! I love the Justice Democrats, and AOC especially! 

 

 

[fraurosena]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

More on Carl Kline: "House panel moves to hold former White House official in contempt after he obeys Trump administration’s instruction not to testify"

Spoiler

The House Oversight Committee moved Tuesday to hold a former White House personnel security director in contempt of Congress for failing to appear at a hearing investigating alleged lapses in White House security clearance procedures.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said he would consult with the House counsel and members of the panel about scheduling a vote on contempt for former White House personnel security director Carl Kline. At the instruction of the White House, Kline failed to show up for scheduled testimony on security clearances.

The move marks a dramatic escalation of tensions between Congress and the Trump White House, which is increasingly resisting requests for information from Capitol Hill.

“The White House and Mr. Kline now stand in open defiance of a duly authorized congressional subpoena with no assertion of any privilege of any kind by President Trump,” Cummings said in a statement. “Based on these actions, it appears that the President believes that the Constitution does not apply to his White House, that he may order officials at will to violate their legal obligations, and that he may obstruct attempts by Congress to conduct oversight.”

The standoff comes as the Trump administration pushes back against congressional inquiries targeting the White House, which have proliferated since Democrats took control of the House in January.

White House deputy counsel Michael M. Purpura wrote a letter Monday instructing Kline, who now works at the Defense Department, not to show up for a scheduled deposition before the committee Tuesday.

In a letter to Kline’s lawyer obtained by The Washington Post, Purpura wrote that a committee subpoena asking Kline to appear “unconstitutionally encroaches on fundamental executive branch interests.”

In a separate letter Monday, Kline's attorney, Robert Driscoll, told the panel that his client would adhere to the White House recommendation.

“With two masters from two equal branches of government, we will follow the instructions of the one that employs him,” Driscoll wrote in the letter addressed to Cummings.

On Tuesday, Driscoll said that he and his client “take seriously” both the committee’s concerns and the direction of the White House.

“We will continue to review the proceedings and make the best judgments we can," he said.

Cummings signed a subpoena this month for Kline to appear Tuesday.

That subpoena followed testimony from a White House personnel security whistleblower, Tricia Newbold, who alleged that the White House had been recklessly granting security clearances to individuals whom lower-level administration personnel staff had found unworthy.

Newbold, who processed security clearances under Kline at the White House for the first two years of the administration, told Cummings’s panel that more than two dozen denials for security clearances had been overturned during the Trump administration. She said that Congress was her “last hope” for addressing what she considered to be improper conduct that left the nation’s secrets exposed.

Newbold, an 18-year veteran of the security clearance process who has served under Republican and Democratic presidents, said she warned her superiors that clearances “were not always adjudicated in the best interest of national security” — and that she faced retaliation for doing so.

Among those whose clearances she questioned was presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, who President Trump ultimately demanded be granted a permanent top-secret clearance, despite the concerns of intelligence officials.

Kushner was identified only as “Senior White House Official 1” in committee documents released during the first week in April following Newbold's testimony. In her deposition, Newbold said her staff determined that Official 1 had too many “significant disqualifying factors” to receive a clearance.

However, that recommendation was overruled by Kline, the career official who then headed the office, according to Newbold’s interview with committee staff.

While Kushner’s security clearance was pending, he held an interim top-secret clearance that at one point also gave him access to some of the government’s most sensitive materials, including the president’s daily intelligence brief, The Washington Post has reported.

Last February, his clearance was reduced to “secret” as part of an effort by then-chief of staff John F. Kelly to limit the number of White House officials without permanent clearances who had access to highly classified material.

Trump then personally directed Kelly to give Kushner a top-secret clearance — a move that made Kelly so uncomfortable that he documented the request in writing, according to people familiar with the situation.

The letters from the White House and Kline’s lawyer came late Monday, following a day that began with another confrontation with Congress.

Earlier Monday, the Trump Organization filed a lawsuit to prevent an accounting firm from complying with a committee subpoena for eight years’ worth of Trump’s financial records.

In a statement issued this month, Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, accused Cummings of politicizing the security clearance issue, one that he said should be bipartisan.

“Chairman Cummings’ investigation is not about restoring integrity to the security clearance process, it is an excuse to go fishing through the personal files of dedicated public servants,” Jordan said in the statement.

Republicans said Cummings “cherry-picked” excerpts of the closed-door interview with Newbold, whom they characterized as a disgruntled employee with limited knowledge of how security clearance decisions are made.

 

[fraurosena]

42 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

More on Carl Kline: "House panel moves to hold former White House official in contempt after he obeys Trump administration’s instruction not to testify"

  Hide contents

The House Oversight Committee moved Tuesday to hold a former White House personnel security director in contempt of Congress for failing to appear at a hearing investigating alleged lapses in White House security clearance procedures.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said he would consult with the House counsel and members of the panel about scheduling a vote on contempt for former White House personnel security director Carl Kline. At the instruction of the White House, Kline failed to show up for scheduled testimony on security clearances.

The move marks a dramatic escalation of tensions between Congress and the Trump White House, which is increasingly resisting requests for information from Capitol Hill.

“The White House and Mr. Kline now stand in open defiance of a duly authorized congressional subpoena with no assertion of any privilege of any kind by President Trump,” Cummings said in a statement. “Based on these actions, it appears that the President believes that the Constitution does not apply to his White House, that he may order officials at will to violate their legal obligations, and that he may obstruct attempts by Congress to conduct oversight.”

The standoff comes as the Trump administration pushes back against congressional inquiries targeting the White House, which have proliferated since Democrats took control of the House in January.

White House deputy counsel Michael M. Purpura wrote a letter Monday instructing Kline, who now works at the Defense Department, not to show up for a scheduled deposition before the committee Tuesday.

In a letter to Kline’s lawyer obtained by The Washington Post, Purpura wrote that a committee subpoena asking Kline to appear “unconstitutionally encroaches on fundamental executive branch interests.”

In a separate letter Monday, Kline's attorney, Robert Driscoll, told the panel that his client would adhere to the White House recommendation.

“With two masters from two equal branches of government, we will follow the instructions of the one that employs him,” Driscoll wrote in the letter addressed to Cummings.

On Tuesday, Driscoll said that he and his client “take seriously” both the committee’s concerns and the direction of the White House.

“We will continue to review the proceedings and make the best judgments we can," he said.

Cummings signed a subpoena this month for Kline to appear Tuesday.

That subpoena followed testimony from a White House personnel security whistleblower, Tricia Newbold, who alleged that the White House had been recklessly granting security clearances to individuals whom lower-level administration personnel staff had found unworthy.

Newbold, who processed security clearances under Kline at the White House for the first two years of the administration, told Cummings’s panel that more than two dozen denials for security clearances had been overturned during the Trump administration. She said that Congress was her “last hope” for addressing what she considered to be improper conduct that left the nation’s secrets exposed.

Newbold, an 18-year veteran of the security clearance process who has served under Republican and Democratic presidents, said she warned her superiors that clearances “were not always adjudicated in the best interest of national security” — and that she faced retaliation for doing so.

Among those whose clearances she questioned was presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, who President Trump ultimately demanded be granted a permanent top-secret clearance, despite the concerns of intelligence officials.

Kushner was identified only as “Senior White House Official 1” in committee documents released during the first week in April following Newbold's testimony. In her deposition, Newbold said her staff determined that Official 1 had too many “significant disqualifying factors” to receive a clearance.

However, that recommendation was overruled by Kline, the career official who then headed the office, according to Newbold’s interview with committee staff.

While Kushner’s security clearance was pending, he held an interim top-secret clearance that at one point also gave him access to some of the government’s most sensitive materials, including the president’s daily intelligence brief, The Washington Post has reported.

Last February, his clearance was reduced to “secret” as part of an effort by then-chief of staff John F. Kelly to limit the number of White House officials without permanent clearances who had access to highly classified material.

Trump then personally directed Kelly to give Kushner a top-secret clearance — a move that made Kelly so uncomfortable that he documented the request in writing, according to people familiar with the situation.

The letters from the White House and Kline’s lawyer came late Monday, following a day that began with another confrontation with Congress.

Earlier Monday, the Trump Organization filed a lawsuit to prevent an accounting firm from complying with a committee subpoena for eight years’ worth of Trump’s financial records.

In a statement issued this month, Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, accused Cummings of politicizing the security clearance issue, one that he said should be bipartisan.

“Chairman Cummings’ investigation is not about restoring integrity to the security clearance process, it is an excuse to go fishing through the personal files of dedicated public servants,” Jordan said in the statement.

Republicans said Cummings “cherry-picked” excerpts of the closed-door interview with Newbold, whom they characterized as a disgruntled employee with limited knowledge of how security clearance decisions are made.

 

What does this mean for Kline? They hold him in contempt, and then what? What are the repercussions, the consequences? 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Steve King, censured by his colleagues for racist remarks, compares himself to Jesus"

Spoiler

Scripture teaches that Jesus was silent before his accusers.

Congressman Steve King? Not so much.

The nine-term Iowa Republican on Tuesday said the censure he has faced for statements embracing white nationalism gave him greater insight into the suffering endured by Jesus. In making that point, he seemed to liken himself to the Christian savior.

He offered the comparison at a town hall in Cherokee, Iowa, where the congressman, who maintains he has “nothing to apologize for,” responded to a comment from a pastor named Pinky Person. The 90-year-old pastor — who later told The Washington Post of King, “I love him” — shared her view with the Republican lawmaker that “Christianity is really being persecuted, and it’s starting right here in the United States.”

“I would just like to make a statement that with all the problems that we have, if we would just allow God to work, and keep on praying and keep on believing and keep on working together, we could overcome so many of these problems,” she said.

For King, the observation led him to ponder his own problems. He was stripped of committee assignments in January after asking, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” For years, he has employed racist language and amplified the voices of far-right figures, tweeting his support for ethnic nationalism and recirculating a message from a self-described “Nazi sympathizer.”

His party — which he has helped steer to the right on issues such as immigration and abortion — used to tolerate it. This year, the dam broke, but King says he’s still afloat.

“It’s been, for all that I’ve been through, it seems even strange for me to say it, but I’m at a certain peace, and it’s because of a lot of prayers for me,” he said. Earlier this year, the Iowa Republican said the prayers of his constituents might cause House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, to reconsider his decision to isolate him.

But the verdict didn’t change, as King told the town hall. In describing his experience on Capitol Hill, the congressman conjured a courtroom scene, evoking the trial that, in the telling of the New Testament, preceded the crucifixion, death and burial of Jesus. King called his fellow lawmakers “accusers.”

“And when I had to step down to the floor of the House of Representatives and look up at those 400-and-some accusers — you know, we’ve just passed through Easter and Christ’s Passion — and I have a better insight into what He went through for us, partly because of that experience,” he said. (King’s spokesman didn’t immediately return a query inviting the congressman to elaborate on his analysis.)

Seeing that his travails had biblical parallels, King said, made him grateful for the sizable share of Christians in his district, which lies in the northwest quadrant of the state.

Thirty-six percent of adults in Iowa attend religious services at least once a week, according to Pew’s 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study. The largest share of Christians in Iowa are baby boomers. Most have a high school degree or less, and 93 percent identified as white. King’s district is 92 percent white, according to census data.

“We have a strong Christian ethic here and a high percentage of people that are true believers,” he said.

Then he offered an extended defense of his view that Christianity defines American culture.

He recalled how he had once caused some “friction” by putting forward a resolution that “honored Christ at Christmas” as a response to a pair of resolutions that “honored a whole bunch of religions that I had never heard of.”

When he appeared on a radio program to discuss the controversy, he said, the host told him, “This is not a Christian nation, congressman. You know that. There’s nothing in the Declaration, nothing in the Constitution that says we’re a Christian nation.”

King disagreed. “There’s plenty in our history, plenty in our culture and plenty in the experiences and the lives of our Founding Fathers that says otherwise,” he told his interlocutor.

He vowed, “This is a Christian nation, and I’ll prove it to you.”

As proof, King laid out a hypothetical situation in which “you run over the neighbor’s dog and you kill it.” The natural response, “if you’re any kind of a man,” is to knock on your neighbor’s door and explain what happened.

“That’s called confession,” King said.

After that, you say, “I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry; I’m sorry I killed your dog.”

“That’s called repentance,” King explained.

And your neighbor, “if he’s any kind of a man,” forgives you.

“That’s called redemption,” King noted.

Proof complete. The congressman concluded: “If it were any other way, we wouldn’t be the America we are, and probably wouldn’t be an America at all.”

Reached by phone Tuesday evening, Person — whose first name, “Pinky,” is a nickname based on her maiden name, “Pinske” — said she thought King’s response to her comment was “wonderful.”

“He’s very articulate in all his responses,” she said.

The 90-year-old pastor said the festival commemorating the resurrection of Jesus had led the congressman to consider his own suffering.

“When he came home for Easter and he realized what has been done to him in the House of Representatives — what has unjustly been done to him — he had an inkling of what it was like to have everyone against you, like everyone turned against Jesus,” she said.

Person has been a devoted supporter of her congressman ever since she moved to the district from Upstate New York in December 2000. What won her over, she said, was that King had an aide whose responsibility it was to engage with clergy in the area. “I immediately thought this is a good guy,” she said.

Originally from Minnesota, she attended the Rhema Bible Training College in Broken Arrow, Okla. After a few decades on the East Coast, she decided to move back to the Midwest to make attending family weddings and funerals more convenient.

More than 18 years later, she is still pastoring at her Full Gospel church in Cherokee, called Faith In Christ Fellowship. She also writes a 1,250-word column each week for a local paper, she said.

Person stopped driving last August, making it more difficult for her to travel to King’s town halls. The congressman, who faces a stiff primary challenge from Republican state Sen. Randy Feenstra as he seeks a 10th term in 2020, announced in January that he would hold an event this year in each of the 39 counties in his district.

So Person was thrilled to learn that King was paying a visit to Cherokee this week. She wrote to him in advance to let him know that he could “count on the good, strong Christian folks of northwest Iowa.”

In her view, his comments have been taken out of context. She sees the move to condemn him as part of a broader assault on the values dear to people in his district. She said she was motivated to speak at the town hall because of her fear that the government is tearing down crosses and trying to bar “use of the name Jesus or Christ at Christmastime.”

A study by Pew in 2018 found that governments around the world were adopting more restrictions on religion. Globally, religiously motivated violence has erupted recently in Sri Lanka, where Christians were targeted in Easter Sunday bombings, and in New Zealand, where Muslims were targeted in mosque shootings in March. In the case of the United States, the nonpartisan research center called attention to “derogatory rhetoric” directed at the Muslim community by President Trump.

The Iowa pastor sees Trump, along with King, as an ally of Christians. She was among the more than 60 percent of voters in the district who backed him in 2016. She plans to do so again in 2020.

But she won’t do much campaigning or fundraising on the president’s behalf.

“I’m busy,” she said.

Besides, she’s more focused on what’s closer to home — King and his fight for political resurrection.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

@fraurosena -- there is some verbiage in this article that discusses the implications of being declared in contempt of congress. "How the Trump-Congress subpoena fight is likely to play out"

Spoiler

It’s safe to say that President Trump is, at best, indifferent to the system of checks and balances that gives Congress the power to oversee his administration and his presidency. Trump has regularly complained about the number of investigations initiated by Democrats since they retook control of the House in January, at times conflating those probes with the most frequent target of his frustration, the investigation conducted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

The Democrats don’t seem to be particularly worried about Trump’s complaints. In recent weeks, the salvo of requests has included demanding Trump’s tax returns, requesting testimony from an official in charge of security clearances and seeking testimony from former officials cited in Mueller’s report, such as former White House counsel Don McGahn. If it’s not a full-court press, it’s getting there.

In response, Trump has dug in. The Treasury Department missed a Tuesday deadline to hand over the tax returns. The White House’s personnel security director, Carl Kline, was instructed not to respond to a subpoena. On Tuesday afternoon, The Washington Post reported that the White House planned to fight the subpoena issued to McGahn on the basis of executive privilege.

We’re just past the brink of a wide-ranging, multifront legal fight between the executive and legislative branches. To determine who’s most likely to win that fight, I spoke with Lisa Kern Griffin, a law professor at Duke University.

The core legal fights

During our conversation, Griffin outlined five areas, delineated later in this article, in which Congress and the president were likely to butt heads. But, more broadly, she explained a central advantage enjoyed by the president.

“Congress does have the power to subpoena records and testimony in order to exercise its legitimate oversight function, and it has pretty broad authority in defining what falls within those legitimate exercises of authority,” she explained.

But, she continued, “it takes time for those things to be enforced.” Subpoenas and contempt citations issued by Congress last only for the duration of that Congress — meaning that subpoenas issued now will expire when the new Congress is installed in January 2021. They can be renewed, but if, for example, Republicans retake the House, it’s fairly safe to assume they won’t be.

The White House is quite aware of the time limit on the actions taken by House Democrats.

"I think that they can slow-walk it, and that their intent is actually to try to run out the clock until the end of the Congress itself and, of course, up until the election in 2020,” Griffin said.

Part of the problem for Congress is that it lacks a robust criminal enforcement mechanism. A recent Congressional Research Service report delineated the two ways in which Congress could pressure administration officials to respond to subpoenas: criminal contempt citations or civil enforcement.

Contempt citations for ignoring subpoenas are powerful in theory, but, problematically in this moment, they rely on the Justice Department for enforcement. In the past, administrations have simply declined to prosecute those found in contempt by Congress. Often, the refusals to comply with the subpoenas in the first place have been rooted in claims of executive privilege.

That’s an important concept. The short version is that administrations can refuse to provide information by claiming that doing so would reveal details of high-level decision-making that should remain protected. If challenged, the issue would come before a judge to determine whether the information being protected deserved to be shielded by privilege.

Even if the Justice Department did prosecute someone for contempt and obtain a conviction, the result would be a misdemeanor, as Randall Eliason, former assistant U.S. attorney for the District and an adjunct professor at George Washington University Law School, explained to The Post last year.

The civil enforcement process jumps directly to the courts. Those refusing to comply with a subpoena could end up facing a daily fine until they comply. There would likely be no shortage of people willing to help cover those costs. Especially since the fines would likely only apply from the point at which the court finally ruled in the matter — rarely a quick process — until the subpoena potentially expired in early 2021.

How specific fights may be resolved

Again, though, not all of the fights Trump and Congress will be engaged in have the same legal parameters. Here are five situations that Griffin outlined in our call.

Requests for testimony under oath from administration officials

This is the situation with Kline, the official in charge of granting security clearances in the White House. Democrats want to ask Kline about the clearance granted to senior adviser Jared Kushner despite apparent concerns from security officials, among other things.

This is sort of situation that most obviously adheres to the debate outlined above. The Trump administration will assert privilege, and Congress will try to compel testimony anyway. The claim of privilege will likely be evaluated in court.

In the past, Griffin noted, both sides usually worked on a compromise short of that, determining some limited points of testimony or to agree to provide certain information. The Trump administration, though, has demonstrated little interest in even that level of compliance.

“There is no reason to go any further” than working with the probe by special counsel Mueller, Trump said in an interview with The Post, “and especially in Congress, where it’s very partisan — obviously very partisan.”

“Most of the case law on this presumes a sort of quaint world of political accommodation where parties would negotiate about which information will be divulged and which individuals will testify when,” Griffin said. “The current rules and case law are not well equipped to deal with pure, cold stonewalling, which seems to be the White House’s posture with respect to all questions or information now.”

If you’re one of those people tracking the collapse of existing norms in Washington, get out your pencil.

Requests for testimony from former officials

This situation — which applies to McGahn, among others — is trickier.

“When it comes to someone like Don McGahn or, soon enough, Robert Mueller, they are not bound by DOJ policy or by directions they’re receiving from the executive branch,” Griffin explained. “In the case of Don McGahn there may well be privilege issues, but both of those critical witnesses are effectively private citizens or will be at the time that they testify.”

The “privilege issues” to which she refers are issues of executive privilege, not attorney-client privilege. McGahn was White House counsel, but his client was the presidency, not Trump himself.

She noted, though, that executive privilege claims made by the administration (as it seems poised to do) would be iffy. After all, what House members want to discuss with McGahn is largely his testimony before Mueller’s investigators, and the existence of that testimony means that the White House has already declined to protect it as privileged.

“The issues that Congress wants to talk to Don McGahn about involve either no privilege or areas where privilege has already been waived,” she said. “So I don’t anticipate that any assertions of privilege will be meaningful with respect to Don McGahn’s testimony.”

Even if there were other subjects that Congress wanted to broach, McGahn is bound by the administration’s efforts to exert privilege only to the extent that he feels he’s professionally or ethically obliged to respect the White House’s request. Now that McGahn no longer works there, Trump’s leverage over him has evaporated.

Information about administration decision-making

This is one of the more common ways in which Congress seeks information from administrations, asking members of various government departments for information about decision-making or conversations with the White House.

Again, the White House could assert privilege, and, again, normally these requests would traditionally be resolved through negotiation. But here Congress has another tool with which to compel a response: money.

“It has appropriations powers, and sometimes it has used those to leverage information out of agencies, for example,” Griffin said. “There are mechanisms that are more clearly within the House’s control that it can use in any given power struggle over issues of this sort.”

Put simply: If the Department of Interior doesn’t want to answer questions from Congress, the House can decide it doesn’t want to fully fund the Department of the Interior.

The request for the tax returns

This is a very specific subset of the various requests that Congress has made of Trump — but also one of the highest-profile.

Congress set a deadline for Tuesday for the IRS (and its parent, the Treasury Department) to turn over Trump’s returns under a law allowing it to request returns from the agency. The administration responded that it would have a response for House committee chairmen in early May as to whether it would provide the returns at all.

Independently, Trump sued the chairman of the House Oversight Committee to try to block the release of his returns. The suit cited a Supreme Court case from 1880, but that ruling was overturned nearly a century ago.

The effort to block the returns’ release was described to The Post by experts on the legal issues as a delay tactic — one of many that’s again aimed at running out the clock.

Requests for other information from external organizations

House Democrats have also requested information from businesses that worked with Trump before he became president. That includes Deutsche Bank, for example, which provided loans to Trump in recent years.

Here, the president’s position is much weaker.

“Banks are in the habit of complying with valid subpoenas. They receive them from law enforcement all the time,” Griffin said. “I think [Democrats] are more likely to achieve cooperation with entities outside of the executive branch and issues that can’t possibly touch on executive privilege.”

Even if the White House or Trump Organization sued to block the release of information, the banks or other external organizations would have to get court permission to ignore the subpoena while waiting to determine if the information should be withheld.

“It depends on whether the banks fear litigation by the president in a civil suit more than they fear potentially defying a validly issued subpoena for financial information,” she said.

You’ll notice that most of these fights are dependent on how courts weigh in on the matter. Kicking the fights to the court has the benefit for Trump of eating up time, but it also means potentially seeing issues resolved at the highest court in the land, now controlled by a conservative majority.

“Congress can and should win eventually in the lower court,” Griffin said at one point, “but that’s not the end of the story. Some of this could go all the way up to the Supreme Court. It can move faster than ordinary cases, but it is not going to move with lightning speed.”

“And,” she added, “the clock favors one side of the equation here.”

That is, Trump’s.