US attorney general to face contempt vote: House speaker

US lawmakers braced for a divisive and unprecedented vote Thursday to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress after the failure of 11th-hour talks to resolve the crisis. "We're going to proceed," House Speaker John Boehner told reporters Wednesday, setting up a climactic election-year showdown between President Barack Obama's administration and his Republican foes in Congress. "We've given them ample opportunity to comply" with congressional requests for the Justice Department to turn over documents linked to botched gun-running Operation Fast and Furious. Last week Obama invoked executive privilege for the first time to withhold documents sought by the House Oversight Committee, angering Republicans, who charged that it pointed to White House involvement in the scandal. Boehner said White House staffers met with congressional officials as late as Tuesday to seek a negotiated solution that would provide information to the committee while putting a halt to the contempt proceedings against Holder. "Unfortunately, they're not willing to show the American people the truth about what happened," Boehner said. The House Rules Committee meets later Wednesday to address the contempt vote, but since it is majority Republican it is likely to merely determine the formalities of the vote and not recommend a cancelation or postponement. Democrat after Democrat lined up in the chamber to rail against the partisan nature of what would be an unprecedented floor vote to hold a sitting attorney general in contempt, noting that Holder has already turned over 7,600 documents to the committee and testified about the scandal nine times. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee said she was worried that lawmakers will "stop and pause and call each other names" on Thursday rather than focus on key job-creating legislation that must pass Congress before lawmakers go on a one-week July 4th break. "I beg of the speaker of this House, do not go down the pathway of contempt," an impassioned Jackson Lee implored. "I beg of you. Raise this House to a level of dignity." Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney said Republicans were waging nothing less than an election-year "political vendetta" against the Obama administration. She likened the Republicans' obsession with Holder to that of the captain in the Herman Melville's 1851 classic "Moby Dick." "Like Ahab going after the great white whale, they are hoping to spill political blood," she boomed. With the powerful National Rifle Association lobby keeping score of Thursday's action, some Democrats are reported to be joining Republicans in voting for contempt. Boehner dodged the question of why the vote could not be postponed, given the extraordinarily short nine days between the committee and House votes and the fact Holder's case goes to the floor on the same day the Supreme Court is expected to rule on Obama's landmark health care reform law. "We'd really rather not be here," Boehner said. "We'd really rather have the attorney general and the president work with us to get to the bottom of a very serious issue." Launched in Arizona by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Fast and Furious was a sting designed to track weapons bought by Mexican drugs cartels. The agents had abandoned the agency's usual practice of intercepting the weapons, opting instead to allow guns to be smuggled so they could track who they went to. But a large number of arms went missing, and two were later found at the 2010 murder scene of a US Border Patrol agent. The contempt action is in fact two separate resolutions. The first, voted out of the Oversight Committee last week, is the criminal contempt resolution against Holder. Should it pass, that censure is then sent to a US attorney tasked with trying to bring an indictment against Holder for not responding to congressional subpoenas. A second resolution -- the civil component to the contempt resolution -- allows the House to go to court to enforce its contempt order and subpoena.