It's Congress vs the White House: Who Will Win?

This is abnormal," says Richard Ben-Veniste. "The Founders set up a system of checks of balances, and one of those is that the legislature acts as a check on the executive."

A former lead prosecutor with the Watergate Special Prosecution Force who is now a partner at Mayer Brown, Ben-Veniste is referring to the across-the-board resistance President Donald Trump and his administration have mounted against a broad array of House committee inquiries.

When Democrats took control of the House last January, visions of subpoena power danced in their heads. They would finally impose oversight over a President they saw as lawless, corrupt, possibly disloyal, and certainly running amok.

Since then, at least five committee chairs, led by House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler and House Oversight and Reform Committee chairman Elijah E. Cummings, have demanded documents or testimony from more than 100 Trump allies or businesses, including the Trump Organization, the Trump Foundation, and members of the president's family, including his daughter Ivanka and sons Eric and Don, Jr.

Yet six months later, the question looms: Will they have anything to show for their efforts before the next election—just 17 months off.

"We're fighting all of the subpoenas," Trump bluntly told reporters last April.

Though not literally true, his statement "forecast an approach that nobody's taken in the past," says Jonathan Shaub, an attorney who worked extensively on executive privilege and Congressional oversight issues while with the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from mid-2014 to mid-2017. "What is unprecedented is the number of both privilege and immunity claims that have come about."

"The current situation is extraordinary," asserts Mark J. Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and the author of a book on executive privilege. "Our system of separated powers relies on the existence of some