Socialists love nothing more than an old-fashioned show trial. Witness Bernie Sanders’s announcement last week that he’ll subpoena the CEOs of drug makers that have challenged the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) price controls.

It’s a rite of passage these days for CEOs to get hauled before Congress. But the purpose of Congressional hearings is to conduct oversight and inform legislation, not punish government opponents. The latter is what the Vermont Senator is doing as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Sanders last Thursday announced a committee vote on Jan. 31 to subpoena the CEOs of Johnson & Johnson and Merck to testify about the “outrageously high price of prescription drugs.” This would be the first time the committee subpoenas private individuals. Committee staff typically negotiate the terms of executive appearances with companies.

Sanders doesn’t want to negotiate, or conduct actual oversight. He wants to keelhaul the CEOs as punishment for suing the government. The CEOs don’t have particular knowledge about how their drugs are priced in foreign countries—the ostensible subject of Sanders’s hearing—but both companies have offered to send executives who do.

An attorney for J&J wrote in a Jan. 12 letter to Sanders that the company has tried to cooperate with the committee. However, “your staff and your public comments have indicated” that the hearing is intended to target “the companies that pursued litigation challenging certain aspects” of the IRA.

Conscripting the CEOs of select companies challenging the law “seems unlikely to be coincidental,” the letter says. “And it raises significant concerns that the hearing is intended as retribution for the companies’ decisions to exercise their rights to challenge a statute that inappropriately infringes on constitutionally protected freedoms.”

The two drug makers argue in their lawsuits that the IRA exacts an uncompensated taking of their property. If a drugmaker refuses to sign an “agreement” to “negotiate” a drug’s price—or rejects what the government deems a “maximum fair price”—it must pay an excise tax that escalates to 1,900% of the drug’s daily revenue. This is effectively extortion.

Their lawsuits also contend that the IRA violates their speech rights by compelling them to endorse the false narrative that they are participating in a “negotiation” that results in a “fair” price. Lower courts are expected to rule on the lawsuits in the coming months, and appeals could reach the Supreme Court. Is Sanders afraid the government will lose?

His plan to subpoena the CEOs is another display of unconstitutional government coercion, which the J&J letter argues would “exceed Congress’s authority under applicable Supreme Court precedent.” In Watkins v. U.S. (1957), the Court held that congressional investigations conducted solely “to ‘punish’ those investigated are indefensible.”

It’s also rich that Sanders is trying to compel the CEOs’ public testimony while the Biden Administration conducts its sham negotiations behind closed doors. The Health and Human Services Department has threatened drug makers with antitrust litigation if they discuss their negotiations. As the left likes to say, democracy dies in darkness.

Wall Street Journal