On the Hill, Democrats are creating a weapon that might backfire on them

CNN reported this week that House Democrats are building a new legal weapon for 2027: civil lawsuits forcing compliance with congressional subpoenas. This is the latest instrument in what conservatives call “lawfare.”

It is aimed at the Iran war, the White House ballroom project, the Trump family’s business dealings, and the Epstein files.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who could chair the House Judiciary Committee next year, says that a majority would give Democrats “a lot more authority to get ourselves into court.” That’s fair enough. But before anyone sharpens this new blade, it is worth checking whose fingerprints are on the handle.

Right now, as a minority in Congress, House Democrats can send letters and hold press conferences. They cannot force anyone to answer.

If they win the majority, they will gain committee gavels, subpoena power, contempt votes, and, as Raskin referenced, one new option: asking federal judges to order compliance instead of waiting on Trump’s own Justice Department to prosecute him.

This innovation will probably be slower than advertised. The fight over former White House Counsel Don McGahn’s testimony, for example, ran from 2019 to 2021 and ended in a negotiated deal, not a courtroom victory. Subpoena litigation measures progress in years, not in news cycles.

Then there’s the target list. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), likely the next Armed Services Committee chairman , won’t rule out subpoenas for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over Iran and a string of firings. None of that proves wrongdoing — a subpoena is a question, not a verdict. But Pentagon privilege and classification fights alone can eat a congressional term.

State attorneys general, meanwhile, filed at least 156 multistate lawsuits against Trump’s first term. NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity found that the administration lost the large majority of agency-action cases. Litigation isn’t a boutique tool anymore — it’s standard equipment.

The Senate Judiciary Committee spent 2026 unwinding Arctic Frost, the Biden-era FBI probe behind Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump. Grassley’s committee has made public 197 grand jury subpoenas covering more than 430 Republican individuals and organizations. He confirmed that phone carriers turned over phone records tied to eight Republican senators and now-FBI Director Kash Patel . If pulling senators’ phone records counts as “oversight,” then so does subpoenaing a defense secretary’s calendar.

Congress doesn’t get to define ‘legitimate legislative purpose’ as ‘whatever my party happens to be doing this year’ — not this Congress, not the next one, no matter who holds the gavel.”

The election interference case in Georgia added another wrinkle: The Biden White House Counsel’s Office told Fulton County prosecutors in September 2022 that it would not assert executive privilege over former Trump officials’ testimony. That cleared a path for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s case. That alone shows it was never quite true that Biden’s White House stayed out of the case.

The Epstein files cut the other way. Former Vice President Kamala Harris later said the Biden administration kept “an absolute separation” from the Justice Department’s Epstein file for four years rather than push for release. Nobody discovered a taste for transparency until the files became useful as a weapon against Trump.

The same was true of classified documents. The Justice Department that raided Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 answered to a president who was storing his own classified material next to a Corvette in his Wilmington garage . Special Counsel Robert Hur documented this and still declined to recommend charges . Both men mishandled classified records, but only one got the search warrant.

To be sure, oversight is a real constitutional function, not a dirty word. Congress has every right to know whether taxpayer money built a ballroom or whether Pentagon officials misled lawmakers about war powers. Raskin has a point that courts beat negotiation for prying documents loose. Real oversight protects people who have no other way to get a straight answer.

The problem was never oversight. It’s oversight that only ever points in one partisan direction.

So here is a modest proposal for whoever runs the House come January: Pass a standing rule, not a press release, spelling out what makes a subpoena legitimate and which privileges apply, binding both parties equally. Do that, and Democrats get their day in court on the ballroom. Republicans get theirs on Arctic Frost. Nobody gets to invent the rules mid-game just because they hold the gavel.

Failing that, Trump has a simpler option, and former President Joe Biden already wrote the template when he pardoned members of his own family on his way out the door in January 2025. If Trump wants to take the wind out of the coming subpoena fleet before it leaves the dock, the precedent is signed, sealed, and sitting in the Federal Register.

Louis Brandeis said sunlight is the best disinfectant. He never said it only shines on one party’s porch.

Before Congress builds a permanent legal weapon for whoever wins in November, it should build permanent rules for using it, because in Washington, the next subpoena fight is never really the last one.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management.