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 of an impeachment inquiry, to the extent they apply. There is room for inter-branch negotiation and accommodation—though there is an overwhelming presumption in favor of full disclosure and compliance with House subpoenas. But when a President abuses his office to defy House investigators on matters that they deem pertinent to their inquiry, and does so without lawful cause or excuse, his conduct may constitute an unconstitutional effort to seize and break the impeachment power vested solely in the House. In that respect, obstruction of Congress involves "the exercise of official power in a way that, on its very face, grossly exceeds the President's constitutional authority or violates legal limits on that authority."

This is illustrated by President's Nixon case. As explained above, President Nixon allowed senior administration officials to testify and produced many documents. He did not direct anything approximating a categorical and indiscriminate blockade of the House's impeachment inquiry. But in response to the Judiciary Committee's eight subpoenas for recordings and materials related to 147 conversations, he produced only limited documents and edited transcripts of roughly 30 conversations; many of those transcripts were inaccurate or incomplete. President Nixon claimed that his noncompliance was legally defensible, invoking the doctrine of executive privilege.

The Judiciary Committee rejected these arguments and deemed President Nixon's conduct to be impeachable. It observed that his "statements that the institution of the Presidency is threatened when he is required to comply with a subpoena in an impeachment inquiry exaggerate both the likelihood of such an inquiry and the threat to confidentiality from it." The Committee also emphasized that "the doctrine of separation of powers cannot justify the withholding of information from an impeachment inquiry." After all, "[t]he very purpose of such an inquiry is to permit the House, acting on behalf of the people, to curb the excesses of another branch, in this instance the Executive." Therefore, "[w]hatever the limits of legislative power in other contexts—and whatever need may otherwise exist for preserving the confidentiality of Presidential conversations—in the context of an impeachment proceeding the balance was struck in favor of the power of inquiry when the impeachment provision was written into the Constitution."

Because "the refusal of [President Nixon] to comply with the subpoenas was an interference by him with the efforts of the Committee and the House of Representatives to fulfill their constitutional responsibilities," the Judiciary Committee deemed it impeachable. The Committee reached that