@Axtremus said in Treasury to GOP: "Pound Sand.":
Find me a U.S. law that compels an Executive Branch agency to furnish to Congress upon request any specific "suspicious activity report,
Here you go. Basically, McCarthy states that law is The Constitution: https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/congress-must-not-tolerate-the-biden-administrations-obstruction/
In our system, the principal check on executive misconduct is Congress. The Framers did not need to trouble themselves with the farcical proposition that executive misconduct could be contained by prosecutors — i.e., middling executive officials who are subordinate to the president and may be fired by him at any time. When the Constitution went into effect in 1789, federal law enforcement barely existed. It was the states that exercised the police powers of investigation, prosecution, and punishment. The Constitution does not provide for an attorney general; the first Congress did, in the Judiciary Act of 1789. Congress did not create the Justice Department until 1870, and the FBI was not established by statute until 1933. The Framers did not give much thought to federal prosecutors, much less “special” federal prosecutors tasked with probing the executive branch itself.
But, as I related in my 2014 book Faithless Execution, the Framers did give a great deal of thought to how best to rein in potential abuses of the awesome powers they were endowing in the office of the president. Their solution was to make Congress the most powerful branch. (Contrary to popular belief, the three departments of government were not conceived to be “co-equal,” though they are peers.) Congress was given the tools necessary to check executive excess — the power of the purse, the power to create or dismantle executive agencies, the power to conduct oversight of executive operations, the power to reject presidential appointees and treaties, and the power to impeach federal officers up to and including the president, among others.
Needless to say, unlike federal prosecutors and directors of intelligence agencies, Congress does not work for the president; to the contrary, it has an institutional obligation to investigate and effectively address presidential misconduct. If presidential administrations attempt to thwart Congress in that constitutional mission, Congress has the power not just to fight but to overcome such obstruction. All it requires is the will to do so.
The Biden administration is using special counsels as a ploy to obstruct Congress. As we’ve previously discussed (see here and here), there was no reason to appoint a special counsel in Trump’s classified-information case. As for Biden, under long-standing Justice Department guidance, he is not subject to indictment by any federal prosecutor, special or otherwise, while he is a sitting president. It would be wrong under any circumstances for Congress to be told it had to suspend its public-interest and national-security inquiries while prosecutors took their time deciding whether to file charges. It is flatly ridiculous for the administration to take such a position when no criminal charges can be filed for, one presumes, at least two years.
