Lindsey Graham asks Supreme Court to block Georgia grand jury subpoena
Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked the Supreme Court Monday whether the court should grant the American Civil Liberties Union and the House of Representatives a temporary stay on grand jury subpoenas to the state of Georgia. The panel also sent questions to the justices.
In his letter to Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, Graham asked the court to address whether the “procedures employed by the Georgia grand jury were fundamentally unfair.”
Graham’s letter was in response to a similar request made Monday by the ACLU, the House of Representatives and several members of the law-and-order movement, including John Lewis, and Rep. Robert Scott (R-Va.). He also asked the Supreme Court to consider an unusual remedy for the grand jury subpoena dispute, the blocking-subpoena order.
If the Supreme Court did not issue a blocking-subpoena order, Georgia’s grand jury subpoenas — issued last month to all 11 Republican members of the state’s House of Representatives (including three members of Congress) and its four Democratic members of the General Assembly (two of whom are also members of Congress) — should stand.
Those subpoenas, if they were issued now, would force a majority of the state’s House of Representatives — and a majority of its four-member General Assembly — to appear before a state grand jury, for the sole purpose of “testifying on the validity of Georgia’s legislative process.”
That’s the key, in Graham’s view: The grand jury investigation is simply about whether the state of Georgia’s process is constitutional.
The grand jury is supposed to be investigating a “crime” — a crime that, if it existed at all, would have been a felony but has nothing to do with a legislative process that, if it exists at all, only incidentally