You're welcome to come up with numbers proving your point, too. Maybe you remember Republican presidents being treated with kid gloves by a Democratically-controlled legislature. I suspect my memory is a bit more accurate.

Hard numbers on pre-Clinton subpoenas (as the indicator we seem to be settled on) don't seem to come up. It's getting to the point where searches are starting to show this thread as one of the first few entries. Some peripheral references to individual subpoenas are there, dealing with Reagan people related to Iran-Contra and other things. I did find out that the famous "subpoena of Bork's video rental records" is an urban myth.

From the McCarthy era in the 1950s through the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, no Democratic committee chairman issued a subpoena without either minority consent or a committee vote.

This phrase, from the Waxman documents, appears endless times (usually unsourced) along with that famous 1,052 number. This is what I call an "inverted pyramid" of internet information, where thousands of posts ride on a single document or source (it's common on all sides of any internet debate, and one of the things you have to watch for).

Nobody notices the weasel words "without a committee vote." Well gosh, when Democrats were the majority during the 80s, I wonder how many of those votes the Democratic chairmen lost.

Waxman declares he never had to issue a single subpoena when he was chairing a committee in the 80s--but it was a completely different and somewhat obscure committee (Energy and Commerce Committee’s Health Subcommittee). The man is a master of verbal manipulation.

As far as an observer would be able to tell, the entire history of congressional subpoenas on the executive branch began in 1995. And almost everything on this specific issue on the internet uses Waxman as its ultimate data source. You can take that any way you like, but I suspect that if every discussion on a particular issue sourced back to a Republican senator or congressman, you'd be a bit skeptical.