Subpoena Standoff

The battle over congressional testimony by White House aides drags on.

AND SO THE jousting continues. For months the White House has resisted Congress's attempts to compel administration officials to testify about the controversial U.S. attorney firings in 2006. Congress's propensity to let subpoenas fly has been matched only by the administration's hair-trigger reaction of trying to block them by invoking executive privilege. The two sides have thus far failed to strike a compromise; as a result, Bush administration officials, most notably former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers and current chief of staff Joshua B. Bolten, find themselves threatened with criminal contempt for following the president's orders to snub congressional demands. If Congress were to make good on the threat, it would probably try to direct the U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia to lodge the contempt charges in federal court here.

Last week the White House said it would never let that happen. As legal justification, it dusted off a 1984 Justice Department memorandum that concludes that allowing Congress to order around a federal prosecutor would violate the separation of powers, permitting Congress to usurp a role the Constitution clearly assigned to the president. The Clinton administration relied on similar logic in a 1995 legal opinion. We believe that argument has enough merit to discourage lawmakers from taking this route.

But that doesn't mean Congress should drop its pursuit. We continue to believe the administration has been too stingy in sharing information with Capitol Hill. The White House, as it has promised, should make officials available for questioning, but it should drop its insistence that the questioning be done off the record and without a transcript. If lawmakers are truly serious about getting information -- rather than milking the situation for all its political worth -- they should drop their more questionable tactics. If all else fails, Congress could consider other, less constitutionally troubling options, such as filing a civil suit in federal court so that a judge could decide whether the administration was properly invoking executive privilege.

But we hope it doesn't get that far. There's a long history of accommodation between the two branches on these kinds of matters without dragging the third branch into it.