As mentioned in the post below, a Federal District Court Judge heard arguments today in the case, Committee on the Judiciary v. Miers.  The first reports from the hearing are coming out:

House counsel Irvin Nathan said Democrats were forced to file suit because the White House was stonewalling and obfuscating.

“Not only doesn’t [the Judiciary Committee] have the facts from the White House, it has false and misleading facts from members of the Department of Justice,” Nathan said during hearing.

But Carl Nichols, the principal deputy associate attorney general, who argued the case for the White House, said Democrats in Congress failed to negotiate in a reasonable way. He also said they had alternatives to filing suit. They could have arrested Bolten and Miers and jailed them in a cell in the Capitol complex built for holding people in contempt of Congress.

He also said Congress could have decided to withhold Justice Department appropriations or refused to pass judicial nominations.

“They could have said, ‘We’re not going to exercise these powers,’ ” Nichols asserted.

For the record, it was Tom DeLay who had similar idea in mind for CREW's Melanie Sloan:

It wasn't long before Tom DeLay got to know Sloan by name, at one point asking the House Rules Committee to hold crew in contempt of Congress for its role in helping draft an ethics complaint against him in 2004. "I thought, 'This will be great—they can lock me in the basement of the Capitol,'" Sloan recalls.