When Douglas Letter appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court this month to argue a pair of cases on subpoenas for the president's private tax records, it was his third time before the justices since he was named House general counsel nearly 18 months ago.

During his tenure, the U.S. House of Representatives' workload has reached staggering levels: Letter's team has been involved in at least 31 federal lawsuits since January 2019. That includes 14 lawsuits where the House is an amicus, on top of an impeachment investigation and trial. 

That's a significant uptick compared with the 10 total federal actions prior House general counsel Thomas Hungar was tied to during his two and a half years leading the office. Kerry Kircher, who was general counsel from 2011 to 2016, represented the House in at least 25 federal cases, and Geraldine Gennet was tied to at least 29 suits during her decade as general counsel, according to online court records.

Most of the work is in line with the general duties outlined for the House's Office of the General Counsel: represent lawmakers and their interests in court. But the explosion in litigation involving Trump or his administration has resulted in an unprecedented level of work for the office, which simultaneously faces the pressure of setting precedent that will impact not only its existing cases but those down the road. The stakes and the volume of cases have never been higher.

"It was a full-time operation, but we were not pressed and it was large enough when we did it," said Irvin Nathan, who signed House briefs in at least 10 federal lawsuits while serving as general counsel from 2007 to 2010. "What's happened now, though, is we have a litigious, obstructionist president engaged in a wholesale obstruction of the Congress and the House in particular. And that has mushroomed the litigation the office is involved in."

The office has expanded to its largest size ever and outside firms have increasingly granted pro bono help as cases make their way through appeals, with many destined for the Supreme Court. 

In interviews, former House counsel said litigation has always been a regular part of the work. But all acknowledge that none of their work was anywhere near the sheer volume faced by the House now.

With partisan gridlock gripping Washington, D.C., it's possible the typically low-profile office could become a more regularly used weapon in the House's arsenal if future administrations embrace Trump's stonewalling approach. And if Trump is reelected in 2020, the legal fights won't end anytime soon.

A Few Extra Helping Hands

House attorneys working under Letter, who previously spent 40 years at the Department of Justice, have not been on their own: Of the 31 federal cases filed since Nancy Pelosi was made speaker in 2019, only seven solely have congressional lawyers listed on their briefs.

Attorneys with Sidley Austin have taken the lead in the House's border wall litigation, both in filing amicus briefs in challenges playing out in federal court in California, and the House's own lawsuit challenging it. And a team from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe has joined up with the House to file amicus briefs in at least seven lawsuits as well as a Supreme Court brief against the Trump administration's "public charge" rule, which makes it harder for undocumented immigrants who receive public benefits to obtain legal citizenship.

More recently, pro bono counsel with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom helped the House file an amicus brief to a challenge to the Trump administration's change to SNAP benefits, and Jenner & Block lawyers are now on board in the fight over former White House counsel Don McGahn's testimony. Georgetown Law's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection are involved in a number of House lawsuits, including the amicus brief opposing a citizenship question on the 2020 census.

Attorneys with Robbins, Russell, Englert, Orseck, Untereiner & Sauber have helped with the cases on third-party subpoenas for Trump's tax records, recently argued before the Supreme Court. Debevoise & Plimpton lawyers are on the House lawsuit seeking documents on the attempted citizenship question and signed briefs filed in the Senate impeachment trial, and Munger, Tolles & Olson attorneys are on the House's defense of the Affordable Care Act at the Supreme Court.

Considering the office's current workload, past House counsel said the outside law firms' assistance is likely the only way the House attorneys could have kept up with its dockets.

"I think Doug Letter, who has a history of litigation in the District of Columbia and has contacts at various law firms, has been very resourceful in encouraging them to help out," Nathan said. "I don't think they could have done the job without that help, and I think the help has been very good."

Letter remains the main arguing attorney for the House, but other congressional counsel like deputy general counsel Megan Barbero, another Justice Department veteran, have increasingly taken on arguments on behalf of the House. Unlike in the Defense of Marriage Act or previous Obamacare litigation taken under former Speaker John Boehner, outside counsel have never argued on behalf of the House during Letter's tenure.

The House had to pay outside attorneys to take up the cases, sparking some admonishment from congressional Democrats over taxpayers footing the bill. "It wasn't like I could have gotten top-notch representation on a pro bono basis to do that," Kircher, the House general counsel at the time, said in an interview last year.

Lawmakers hired former Solicitor General Paul Clement, who reportedly left King & Spalding in order to take up the divisive DOMA litigation in 2012. Clement and a team with Bancroft took the lead in intervening in roughly a dozen federal lawsuits involving DOMA to defend the constitutionality of the law, and it was Clement who argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court—a move seemingly aimed at putting some distance between the case and the typically low-profile House lawyers. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley also argued the House's lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act. 

The former House lawyers said the ongoing lawsuits, some of which could uncover information that could set off another impeachment inquiry, are more suited for Letter's team to argue themselves.

"My own opinion is, the impeachment cases are so fundamental to the authority of the House," said Thomas Spulak, a King & Spalding partner and House counsel from 1994 to 1995. "It's the House that has the sole constitutional authority to impeach. I think you want to have the House's lawyers standing up and making that argument."

Hungar, a Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner who was general counsel prior to Letter, said the Affordable Care Act and DOMA litigation "weren't as important in a core institutional sense as these cases are."

"These cases go to the very core of what the general counsel's office is supposed to be doing," he said.

'A Wave Rather Than a Tide'

Former counsel all agreed the current House suits are centered around defending core institutional interests like lawmakers' subpoena and oversight powers. But the cases are playing out in the backdrop of fierce political fighting between the Trump White House and House Democrats led by Pelosi. House Republicans have also generally not agreed with the lawsuits, only furthering that partisan divide.

Stanley Brand, who was 28 when Speaker Tip O'Neill named him the first House counsel in 1978, said litigation took up much of his time from the start, and said he was "fairly aggressive about pushing the boundaries" of the House's legal rights, including challenges to subpoenas for congressional documents. The work took place in the shadow of Watergate, which famously established sweeping oversight powers for Congress.

"Those battles had to be fought because the House had never taken that kind of view of its own institutional legal interests," Brand said.

The office was later structured to report to the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, a group of the five highest-ranking members of the House including the Speaker of the House. That means whichever party controls the chamber typically has majority rule of the BLAG, which authorizes the counsel's office to take legal action on behalf of the House.

Steven Ross, a partner with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld who was deputy general counsel under Brand and later led the office for a decade, said when there were splits within the BLAG on which cases to take up, it wasn't necessarily along partisan lines. "If there was going to be one defining characteristic as to where people landed on a lot of those issues, it tended to be between the people in the legal group who were lawyers versus the people in the legal advisory group who were not," he said.

William Pittard, a partner with KaiserDillon who was deputy general counsel during the DOMA litigation, said even if outsiders viewed some of the lawsuits as partisan, "within the office that certainly was not the mindset." "Democratic members called all the time, and we helped them just as enthusiastically," he said. 

But as polarization has increased in Washington, counsel said the House may not be able to avoid the political tinge on the lawsuits. And some said, considering the general counsel reports to the BLAG and therefore generally the speaker of the House, the congressional lawyers may become a more frequently wielded tool during political fights even if the conflict is over an institutional injury.

Spulak said in the late 1990s, the office started to become "more aligned with the goals of the majority" party that controlled the House. "As the leadership became more active and controlling, I think that's the way they wanted their attorneys to act," he said.

Others said the office's number of cases is inherently cyclical. Ross said he thinks the amount of work can "ebb and flow." "To me the level of acrimony between the branches right now is a wave rather than a tide," he said.

Several former counsel also acknowledged that the amount of litigation is certain to fall off if Trump loses reelection to former Vice President Joe Biden in November. 

And if Trump wins and Democrats hold onto the House? "If President Trump gets reelected, the House's counsel's office inbox will be stuffed with litigation documents for the next four years," said Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and former deputy general House counsel.

"Traditionally there is more legal fighting in a second term between Congress and an administration, because the moment a president is reelected he's a lame duck," Tiefer said. "Congress asserts its oversight powers, and the president resists."