Ditto what acsenray said. The speech and debate clause has been construed to extend far beyond simple immunity from arrest, into protecting all sorts of legislative activities.
According to the Annotated Constitution: “Thus, so long as legislators are ‘‘acting in the sphere of legitimate legislative activity,’’ they are ‘‘protected not only from the consequence of litigation’s results but also from the burden of defending themselves.’’” Seems pretty broad to me.
And it is unimaginable to think how debate (even a filibuster) could not be construed to be within the sphere of legitimate legislative activity.
Probably not covered by copyright infringement but perhaps classifed and definitely purposefully delayed in publication by the Nixon-era Department of Defense were the Pentagon Papers, 4000 pages of which became public domain when entered into the Congressional Record by Senator Michael Gravel in June, 1971.
I believe this is incorrect. In the beginning the Senate was a more openly aristocratic body and its sessions were closed. The books I have read on the period use the private diary of Pennsylvania senator William Maclay as the main source of information on early Senate activities. Here’s what one historian has to say:
The Senate met almost exclusively in executive session until the fourth Congress: it began opening its doors to the press and public in 1794 and 1795. Its debates were not regularly transcribed until 1800, when the privately published National Intelligencer began covering the debates (and, incidentally, letting senators edit their own speeches before publication, which has grown into the modern practice of “revising and extending” remarks that I wrote about earlier in this thread). Official, verbatim, gavel-to-gavel transcription of its debates did not begin until 1848.
But numerous sources – including individual senators like Maclay, as well as political newspapers – unofficially reported the proceedings, even during the early years’ closed sessions. These unofficial reports were later compiled in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, which does indeed report the proceedings back to the first Congress: