Sometime today, while the media and political worlds are totally and completely absorbed in the Supreme Court’s healthcare ruling, the United States House of Representatives will vote to hold the Attorney General in contempt. On any other day, this would be a seismic political event, the first time in American history that a Cabinet member has faced such a rebuke. But today, it will essentially be a footnote.
It’s hard to read this timing as an accident.
The contempt vote was scheduled by John Boehner, who has spent his 18-month run as Speaker trying to balance his more pragmatic political instincts with his caucus’ zeal for ideological absolutism and partisan warfare. He hasn’t had much room to maneuver – Boehner came to the job as a D.C. lifer, not a Tea Party outsider, so the base has constantly been on the lookout for signs of betrayal – but he does what he can to temper his party’s most self-destructive impulses.
Today’s vote is a good example.
The drive to hold Holder in contempt grew out of an attempt by conservative leaders, activists and media outlets to turn the tragic death of U.S. border patrol agent Brian Terry into a political scandal involving the Obama administration. On the right, the Fast and Furious story has been a huge deal for well over a year now, but it wasn’t until the last few weeks that Americans who aren’t regularly exposed to Fox News or conservative talk radio heard much, if anything, about it. And now that Fast and Furious is attracting real media scrutiny, the basic premise – that ATF agents intentionally permitted guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug gangs — is crumbling apart, as a new Fortune magazine report thoroughly explains.
What’s left is the right’s determination to pin something, anything on the Obama administration – and Holder, its top target among Obama Cabinet officials from the start of his presidency, in particular. The contempt vote, after all, isn’t even about the circumstances that led to Terry’s killing; it’s about vague, unsubstantiated suggestions that the Justice Department engaged in some kind of political cover-up after the fact. Conspiracy theories enter the picture here, with the numerous Republican congressmen – including the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Darrell Issa – and the NRA claiming that the administration tried to arm Mexican drug gangs in order to create a tragedy that would build momentum for domestic gun control efforts.
