INHERENT CONTEMPT
Detain Pam Bondi
Let’s clear up a collective hallucination before it hardens into received wisdom: inherent contempt is not a fine with a fancier name. It is not a polite invoice Congress sends when it feels ignored. It is Congress reaching back into the Constitution’s original toolkit and pulling out the one instrument designed for people who treat subpoenas like spam email. And yes, if written that way, inherent contempt can include physical custody of the contemnor. Including, in theory, Pam Bondi.
That sentence alone explains why so many pundits suddenly develop laryngitis when custody comes up.
Inherent contempt predates the modern DOJ, cable news, and the idea that accountability should arrive by certified mail six months after everyone’s moved on. It’s Congress saying: we asked, you refused, now sit down. Literally. The power was used repeatedly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, back when lawmakers still believed authority was something you exercised, not something you described wistfully on Sunday shows.
Take John Nugent, a newspaper reporter who leaked a confidential treaty draft in 1848. The Senate demanded his source. Nugent refused, citing press freedom. The Senate responded by voting him in inherent contempt and ordering the Sergeant at Arms to arrest him. He was detained in a Capitol room for over a month. No fines. No DOJ referral. No long debate about optics. Just confinement until Congress adjourned and decided it had made its point. Nugent didn’t get a GoFundMe. He got a chair and a lot of time to think about his life choices.
Or look at William Duane, a fiery newspaper editor hauled before the Senate in 1800. When Duane refused to answer questions, the Senate ordered his arrest. He was taken into custody by the Sergeant at Arms and held until the Senate decided to release him. This was not treated as shocking tyranny. It was treated as Congress doing its job with the tools it had.
Fast forward to the 1930s, when Congress briefly remembered it still had a spine. Mally Daugherty, brother of former Attorney General Harry Daugherty, refused to testify during a Senate investigation into DOJ corruption. The Senate ordered his arrest under inherent contempt. He was detained in a local jail under Senate authority. He challenged it all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld Congress’s power to do exactly that. The Court did not blink. It did not clutch pearls. It said, in essence, yes, Congress can do this, and always could.
Notice the pattern. No one was tortured. No one disappeared. No one was punished for punishment’s sake. The detention was coercive, not punitive. You comply, you leave. You stall, you sit. The discomfort came not from cruelty, but from the sudden loss of control over time and movement. That is the part modern officials find deeply upsetting.
So when today’s pundits talk about inherent contempt and only mention fines, what they’re really doing is sanding down the Constitution until it fits politely between commercial breaks. Fines are safe. Fines sound grown-up. Fines let everyone pretend Congress is trying while ensuring nothing actually changes. Custody, on the other hand, forces an uncomfortable acknowledgment: Congress has chosen not to use its most effective tool for decades, not because it’s illegal, but because it works too well and scares everyone involved.
If the House were to draft inherent contempt charges explicitly authorizing custody, and pass them by a simple majority, the Sergeant at Arms could be directed to take the contemnor into physical custody until compliance. Not jail in the cinematic sense. A secure room. A chair. A clock that stops being yours. Counsel allowed. Meals provided. Drama discouraged. Compliance rewarded instantly with freedom. That’s the mechanism. Old. Lawful. Effective. Forgotten on purpose.
Which brings us back to Pam Bondi. The reason her name makes people nervous in this conversation isn’t that she’s special. It’s that she’s current. Imagining custody in the abstract is easy. Imagining it applied to a sitting Attorney General snaps the spell. Suddenly everyone remembers that Congress is not supposed to be a suggestion box, and subpoenas are not performance art.
Inherent contempt with custody isn’t radical. It’s in the toolkit. It’s the Founders assuming adults would eventually have to deal with other adults who refuse to listen. The only shocking thing is how long we’ve pretended it isn’t there.
So the next time someone tells you inherent contempt “just means fines,” understand what they’re really saying: we don’t like talking about the part that actually works.
Most outlets will tell you Congress is “out of options” and leave it at that. We don’t. At Closer to the Edge, we dig up the parts of history and law that make powerful people sweat, like the fact that inherent contempt can include physical custody, that Congress has jailed people before, and that accountability in this country didn’t always arrive as a polite fine six months too late.
Use it now! Lock. Her. Up!
When we live in a time when our President is a rapist, pedophile and 34 count convicted felon, something like inherent contempt isn't even a thought.