MAJORITY OF U.S. HOUSE VOTES ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER IN CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS, VOTING CONTINUES
Typical GOP-style Kabuki theatrics. The GOP had to have some 'victory' (ala Jan Brewer) after their SCOTUS smack-down earlier today.
Next issue.
More GOP foolishnesss. They have no idea how they look in the eyes of normal people.
ok...
Issa needs to stop toying with the Teabaggers emotions. Nothing substantial will come from this farce.
fag talk can you at least try to speak like a man?
Spoken like a yeast-infected Mississippi . Amy, does you husband have to roll you in flour to find your wet-spot, you morbidly obese Mississippi pig.
I heard Penn State wanted to hire you to feed all of those little boys...
Your husband PM'd me and told me he likes to jerk off to pictures of naked masculine men and asked if I were available.
oh, only a brainless person would say something so stupid..
oh, no.. another brain joke..
oh, only a brainless person would say something so stupid..
Once again Amy, you prove that people don't like in others what they see in themselves.
Some kid in Mississippi PM'd me as well. Asked me if I were into college baseball players. I sent him money for a plane ticket.
look at the beautiful healthy brain..
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder faced a contempt of Congress charge on Thursday as the Republican-led House of Representatives was poised to strike back at the Obama administration for refusing to turn over some documents related to a failed gun-running probe.
If the contempt charge is approved later on Thursday, as expected, Holder, the nation's top law enforcement officer, would become the first sitting attorney general - and the first presidential Cabinet member - to be accused of the crime of contempt by the full House.
In a test of sentiment for the contempt charge, the House voted 254-173 to let the debate go forward. The vote was mostly along party lines.
The unprecedented House debate could be overshadowed by a potentially more historic development on Thursday: the U.S. Supreme Court's upholding of Democratic President Barack Obama's controversial healthcare law - a ruling that was reverberating throughout the country.
Nevertheless, the House was devoting much of its legislative session on Thursday to debating Holder's role in "Operation Fast and Furious," which was aimed at following guns being purchased in Arizona to determine whether they flowed into Mexico for use by drug cartels.
According to government figures, between 2007-2011, of 99,000 firearms recovered in Mexico and submitted to U.S. law enforcement, more than 68,000 came from the United States. In recent years, those weapons have shifted more and more from handguns to higher-powered rifles.
By early 2011, Fast and Furious had been terminated after disclosures that federal agents had lost track of many of the high-powered weapons, which subsequently were traced to crimes, including the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
House Republicans and Democrats have engaged in scathing arguments all year over issues ranging from budget and taxes to contraceptives. Thursday's debate was no exception.
Republican Representative Richard Nugent said the Obama administration had done little but "hide, deny and stonewall" in dealing with a House probe of Fast and Furious. He compared its actions to former President Richard Nixon's during the 1970s Watergate scandal.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi accused Republicans of using the election-year contempt charge to undermine Holder's efforts to combat voter suppression in some states.
"This is something that makes a witch hunt look like a day at the beach," Pelosi told reporters. "It is a railroading of a (contempt) resolution that is unsubstantiated by the facts."
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus rallied to defend Holder, the first black U.S. attorney general, and some planned to walk out of the House chamber together in protest of the contempt vote.
The tussle between the Obama administration and House Republicans is over the release of a series of documents dating from February 4, 2011.
The high-stakes fight could jeopardize the jobs of some top Justice Department officials if Congress ultimately finds that they were hiding some important information related to Fast and Furious.
Conversely, Republicans could be embarrassed if nothing turns up and they devoted so much time and energy amid the need to help the struggling U.S. economy - the top priority of voters in the run-up to the November 6 presidential and congressional elections.
As the House debated the contempt accusation, Holder was in Florida, where he was scheduled to speak at the League of United Latin American Citizens annual convention.
HIGH-POWERED LOBBYING
The National Rifle Association, a powerful lobbying organization that opposes gun regulation, has made the Holder contempt move a top priority. It has warned all 435 House members that a vote against the contempt citation would be a black mark against them.
The NRA has argued that Fast and Furious was actually a back-door move by the Obama administration to lay the ground for new gun regulations by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which ran the southwest border gun-running investigation.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, a Republican with close ties to the NRA, thinks emails and other communications being withheld might spell out more detail on the role of top Justice Department officials, especially after they discovered the law enforcement operation had gone bad.
But Obama administration officials point out that the Justice Department already has released more than 7,000 documents to Issa's committee and that they showed that top officials in Washington initially knew little about Fast and Furious, which was hatched by law enforcement officials in Arizona.
House Democrats, meanwhile, have complained that Issa has rejected their calls to investigate Bush administration gun probes similar to Fast and Furious.
The fight between Republicans and Holder escalated last week, after the White House exerted "executive privilege" over the post-February 4, 2011, documents, saying they were protected communications that any administration needs as part of its deliberative process.
Issa's committee, in a partisan vote last week, charged Holder with contempt after negotiations to resolve the dispute failed. House Republican leaders immediately announced that the full House debate and vote would come quickly.
Besides the contempt of Congress charge, the House also is scheduled to vote on a resolution asking U.S. courts to force Holder to turn over a series of documents being sought by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee as part of its long-running investigation of Fast and Furious.
While contempt of Congress charges generally are aimed at forcing officials to produce information to Congress, legal experts point out that they are very hard to enforce and the action could bring months or years of litigation and stalemate.
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