'Won't happen': Legal reporter dumps on GOP's latest anti-Merrick Garland stunt
House Republicans are preparing for a vote on their latest scheme to try to attack Attorney General Merrick Garland — and, noted Politico's Kyle Cheney, there's no chance it will come to anything.
This comes as Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) is announcing a press conference on the action, writing on X, "We will hold Merrick Garland in inherent contempt of Congress. No one is above the law."
"Another thing that won’t happen: a vote to exercise the House’s inherent contempt power for the first time in 100 years," wrote Cheney in response. "And Garland would not be arrested even if they did have the votes."
At issue is Garland's refusal to hand over raw footage of President Joe Biden's interview with special counsel Robert Hur in the classified documents investigation. Republicans already have the transcript of that interview, provided by the DOJ, but the White House asserted executive privilege over the footage, suspicious that House Republicans had no investigative purpose for it and only wanted to look for footage they could manipulate to use in attack ads against Biden. Citing the executive privilege claim, Garland declined to turn it over.
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Typically, the way that contempt of Congress works is that the House votes to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department, which then decides whether or not to prosecute the person for defying Congressional authority. Two associates of former President Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, were charged and convicted in this way; House Republicans also voted to hold Garland in contempt to force him to turn over the footage, but the Justice Department swiftly clarified it would ignore this.
"Inherent contempt," on the other hand, is a different procedure, where Congress votes to actually direct its sergeant-at-arms to arrest someone on their behalf until they cooperate with a directive. This is extremely rare and hasn't been done since the 1930s, mainly because whenever Congress has tried to use it, it has been difficult to enforce and ended up backfiring.
In 2019, when Democrats controlled the House, some members debated exercising inherent contempt against various Trump administration officials who weren't cooperating with investigations, but ultimately the idea was dropped because it was unworkable.