GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, best known for fabricating her entire life story, told Fox News that she has a plan to get the sergeant-at-arms to arrest Attorney General Merrick Garland.
“Several months ago, I introduced a resolution for something called inherent contempt of Congress. This is something that Congress has the authority to do, and it hasn’t been done since the early 1900’s,” she told host Maria Bartiromo on Monday.
Luna was responding to questions about the Justice Department’s announcement that it would not prosecute Garland for not turning over audio of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
“And what that allows Congress to do is really be the punitive arm and really hold Garland accountable by using the sergeant-at-arms to essentially go and get him,” Luna went on, “as well as the tapes, bring him to the well of the house and really be a check-and-balance on the Department of Justice.”
Like most of what Luna says, there are all kinds of facts being misrepresented here. For one, her assertion that she introduced her inherent contempt of Congress resolution “several months ago” is belied by the fact that she actually announced it on May 7. And while that is technically more than one month, it is far less than several months. Though, to be fair, her announcement could have been missed, since it came the same day that Stormy Daniels was testifying … in Trump’s criminal trial.
The sergeant-at-arms is "the chamber’s primary law enforcement official and protocol officer, responsible for maintaining security on the House floor and the House side of the U.S. Capitol complex.”
The case from the “early 1900’s” that Luna is referring to is something some legal scholars felt was more apropos to the unwillingness to comply with requests from Congress by the Trump administration.
The Teapot Dome scandal, which involved President Warren G. Harding’s Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall’s no-bid contract to lease federal oil fields in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, happened in 1922. Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty was heavily criticized at the time for not more thoroughly investigating Fall, who was later convicted of taking a $100,000 bribe.
The scandal escalated to the Senate committee subpoenaing Mally S. Daugherty, the attorney general’s brother.
When Mally Daugherty refused to show up to testify before Congress, the Senate Sergeant at Arms David S. Barry deputized John J. McGrain to arrest him and bring him to Washington to testify.
The Republicans’ fixation on getting audio, despite having already received the entire transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden, has been a transparently political endeavor. Hur, a Republican, released a 375-page report in February saying that no charges were warranted and that Biden had likely kept the documents as a private citizen by “mistake.”
Since then, House Republicans voted to hold Garland in contempt. Speaker Mike Johnson vowed to take the Garland contempt case to court after the DOJ announced it planned no further action. But whether Johnson will bring Luna’s resolution to a vote remains to be seen.
There has been very little tangible action that has come out of the GOP’s neverending political theater. This past year it spent an inordinate amount of time attacking Biden’s border security while trying to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—a stunt that failed miserably.
Luna’s newest resolution is the GOP’s latest political stunt to create a cloud of doubt over Biden’s reelection campaign against convicted felon Trump.
Hopium Chronicles' Simon Rosenberg joins Markos to discuss the “red wave-ification” of the economy and how prepared Democrats are for November. There is still work to do but we have a better candidate—and we have the edge.
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