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The Fifth Amendment's self-incrimination clause is the procedural wall that congressional contempt proceedings cannot breach on their own. A witness who invokes it 111 consecutive times, as Dr.
Anthony Fauci did before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, forces any prosecution to run through the Justice Department, which is now led by a freshly confirmed attorney general whose own confirmation turned on explicit warnings about political lawfare.
The contempt vote and its procedural problem The committee voted 8-5 along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt after he declined to answer questions at a hearing, repeating the same 21-word Fifth Amendment invocation across 111 exchanges.
That single phrase, spoken to the same effect and accumulating 2,331 total words of testimony, was the entirety of his substantive response to the panel's subpoena.
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