Members of Congress fed up with Barack Obama’s imperial presidency finally have decided to use the one tool they have to compel his administration to at least cooperate with Congress. It is the power of the purse – the spending appropriations process Obama cannot overcome through his infamous executive orders.

Members of the House of Representatives are poised to withhold nearly $700 million in State Department funding as a means of forcing that agency to release documents lawmakers have been seeking for months.

They involve an ongoing probe into terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

State Department officials claim they have provided documents sought by Congress as quickly and efficiently as possible. The truth is different, however.

Some documentary evidence regarding the attack will never see the light of day, because of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s actions. While in that post, she used a personal email server, not the government computer she was supposed to rely on, for many of her communications. She has destroyed many of them.

Clinton emails available to the State Department are not being provided quickly. A few weeks ago, a federal judge agreed the agency is dragging its feet on the process. He ordered it to meet a schedule of month-by-month releases.

Obama and others in his administration have the attitude that the executive branch is beyond lawmakers’ control in many ways. House members are right to give him 700 million reasons he is wrong about that.