How oversight and impeachment are related

Kagro X asks an important question about Congress' ability to subpoena witnesses in the context of its Constitutional mandate to exercise oversight:

...[I]f you're conducting oversight of, say, the NSA spying program, and you want answers from [Atty Genl] Gonzales regarding the program's legality, and you subpoena him and he tells you to take a flying leap, what do you do?

This could easily happen because the Legislative branch relies on the Executive branch to enforce the penalties for ignoring subpoenas.

You could try going to court, but not only will that pretty much run out the clock, but the courts are quite likely to tell you, "What are you crying to us for? You have your remedy. If you're too chicken to use it, that's your problem." They may well hand it right back to Congress as a "political question," and refuse to resolve it. After all, tied up in that question is yet another: should the legislative branch be able to leverage the judicial in order to force the executive to submit to its will?

The jury, shall we say, is out on that question.

Long story short: This is not an issue that can be resolved on moral, ethical, legal, or political grounds alone. It can be ignored for any or all of those reasons, but not resolved.

So here's where it's headed:Just as it's the threat of a filibuster that ultimately provides the "power" that makes the "Senatorial hold" possible, so is impeachment the [ultimate remedy] that makes Congressional subpoena power possible for use against the executive branch.And if "impeachment is off the table," what does that say about subpoenas and oversight?

Just consider that there's a legitimate role for impeachment to play, even in the background, but that it must be "on the table" in order to do so. And here I would note that saying it's "off the table" does not by itself take it out of consideration. That's not what this discussion is about, and I think we can discuss the necessity of having this weapon in our hip pocket without necessarily resolving whether or not individual players in Congress did or didn't say it quite the right way.

The Founders gave the Legislative branch many "checks" over the Executive: the ability to control the legislative agenda, power of the purse, oversight and investigation...and, in extreme cases, impeachment and conviction. We'd do well to remember that, whether it's "on the table" or not.