GOP Push To Fine Merrick Garland $10,000 A Day Over Biden Audio Fails
Some Republicans’ effort to punish Attorney General Merrick Garland for withholding audio of an interview with President Joe Biden failed Thursday — but its sponsor pledged to try again.
On a surprise 204-210 vote Thursday, the House scuttled a resolution by right-wing firebrand Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) that would have found Garland in contempt of Congress and fined him $10,000 a day until he turned over the audio of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur’s office.
During Hur’s interview, conducted as part of the investigation of confidential documents Biden held onto after his term as vice president, Biden asks for confirmation of the year in which his son Beau died. Congress already has the transcript of the interview and has been told it is accurate, but House Republicans have insisted on obtaining the original the audio as well — a demand Democrats say is only meant to embarrass Biden, who faces questions over his health.
The outcome of Thursday’s vote was surprising because Luna’s proposal had survived two test votes in the House on Wednesday night, after presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump boosted it in a social media post. In Thursday’s vote, four Republicans crossed over to vote against it.
Luna attributed her measure’s failure to some GOP members’ absence due to “family emergencies,” and said she’d already refiled the resolution so it could be brought to the floor again. The soonest that could happen would be in the week of July 23.
There were a dozen GOP absences for Thursday’s vote, almost a mirror image to the 10 Democrats who were absent for Wednesday’s test votes that allowed the resolution to be brought up for a vote.
“We feel very confident it will pass,” Luna said.
Luna’s proposal was unique in that it would have wielded an authority known as “inherent contempt” to try to punish Garland, and would have been an escalation in the fight between Republicans and Democrats over Garland’s compliance with a GOP subpoena.
When Democrats held the House majority, several Republican lawmakers and Trump administration officials did not honor congressional subpoenas, but Democrats did not try to use inherit contempt to force them to.
Inherent contempt is different than conventional criminal contempt of Congress. It’s a controversial theory that Congress can punish refusal to cooperate with its subpoenas issued while carrying out its duties without having to rely on the executive branch for enforcement.
But it has rarely been used — it was last deployed in the 1930s — because it relies on the House Sergeant-at-Arms, not the executive branch’s law enforcement personnel, to force compliance.
“Despite its potential reach, the inherent contempt power has been described by some observers as cumbersome, inefficient, and ‘unseemly,’” a 2019 Congressional Research Service report said.
