WASHINGTON – Florida Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna plans to force a vote as early as next week to invoke the House’s rarely used “inherent contempt” power to impose a daily fine on U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to obtain tape recordings of a Justice Department special counsel’s interview with President Joe Biden.
The strategy represents a change from an earlier attempt by Luna to request a vote on Garland’s arrest by the Sergeant-at-Arms of the House.
Luna introduced a resolution on June 28, which fines Garland $10,000 a day until he complies with a subpoena and releases tapes of Justice Department Special Counsel Robert K. Hur’s interviews with Biden about his handling of classified information.
The resolution would employ the House’s inherent power to impose a fine. That power — which hasn’t been used in nearly a century — has generally been seen as empowering Congress to arrest and try someone accused of contempt of court, raising questions about how a fine would work.
“While a fine-based approach eliminates some of the logistical problems and challenges associated with arrest and detention, other questions remain about how a fine is actually enforced,” Molly Reynolds, senior fellow for governance studies at the Brookings Institution, told States Newsroom.
Luna’s office did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment on the change in resolutions.
After the July 4 recess, the House of Representatives is scheduled to meet for only four days before recessing again for more than a week due to the Republican Party Convention.
Republicans in the House of Representatives want audio data
Luna’s latest maneuver is part of a broader attempt by the Republican Party to obtain the tapes of the Biden-Hur interview.
Efforts were only intensified after Biden’s impoverished performance during the first presidential debate.
Republicans have said Biden is not fit to stay in the Oval Office for another four years. After the debate on June 27, even some Democrats expressed concerns. Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas demanded the resignation of the President on Tuesday from his re-election campaign.
Republicans in the House of Representatives At the beginning of June Garland for contempt of Congress after he agreed with the President to assert executive privilege over the tapes. However, the Justice Department declined to bring contempt of Congress charges against Garland.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee filed a civil lawsuit July 1 against Garland, asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to overturn Biden’s claim of executive privilege.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said last month that Republicans would “explore all options” to obtain the tapes.
If the House of Representatives passes the resolution, it is still unclear how the fine will be implemented or whether there will be legal action by the Justice Department. The department declined to comment on Luna’s efforts.
Luna initially announced that she would force a vote on her inherent contempt resolution on June 28, but later wrote on Xformerly Twitter that the issue would be raised “at the next meeting” with Johnson’s “full support”.
“It is imperative that we do not waste time and obtain these tapes,” Luna said in an interview with FoxNews this day.
Fighting newcomer
Luna has collided During her first term in the House of Representatives under the Biden administration, she co-sponsored resolutions to impeach officials such as the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alexander MayorkasFBI Director Christopher Wray And garland.
As a member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, she questioned the president’s son, Hunter Biden, about his business dealings and whether those financial gains benefited the president – something for which Republicans in the House of Representatives have found no evidence.
Luna, a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, has also rejected established figures in her own party, initially voting against former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy when he ran for the office in January 2023.
With the backing of former President Donald J. Trump, Luna’s 2022 campaign was able to win Florida’s 13th Congressional District from Democratic Rep. Charlie Crist, who forwent re-election to run against Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. Luna lost to Crist in 2020.
In June 2023, less than six months into her first term, the 35-year-old, who became the first Mexican-American woman elected to Congress for Florida, took on Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who led the House of Representatives during Trump’s first impeachment trial.
Luna led the Censorship efforts against Schiff for remarks about Trump’s ties to RussiaThe House of Representatives approved the motion of no confidence.
How to investigate
In January 2023, Garland appointed Hur, who was a federal prosecutor during the Trump administration, to investigate Biden’s handling of classified information.
The Ministry of Justice has issued a written Transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden to the House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight and Accountability Committee in October 2023, but House Republicans have been pushing for the release of the audio recording since Hur completed his report earlier this year.
Hur declined to prosecute Biden. He concluded in a 388 report published in February that Biden had “intentionally withheld classified information” during his time as vice president, but portrayed Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning older man with a bad memory” whom the jury would likely have sympathy for.
Biden, 81, has vehemently denied the characterization of his memory, but Republicans have sought access to the tape recordings to obtain a more detailed record of the interview.
“Complicated” and “inefficient” process
Luna has argues The inherent contempt of court proceedings would likely be completed more quickly than waiting for a lawsuit to produce the tapes, which the House Judiciary Committee is also seeking.
But House parliamentary experts wrote in a comprehensive and detailed guide to the chamber this year that Congress has largely abandoned its inherent disregard for the law because it is a lengthy and burdensome process.
The 1,073 pages documentauthored by two former House MPs and the current MP, notes that the House has not invoked its inherent power to resolve a contempt case in recent years because the procedures are too time-consuming and the House’s jurisdiction cannot extend beyond the end of a legislative session.
The last time either chamber used the practice of ignoring the law was in 1935, the guide says.
And the non-partisan Congress Research Service said the procedure is typically a multi-step process that “has been described by some observers as cumbersome and inefficient.”
