By Selwyn Duke
The House has voted overwhelmingly to hold
Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for withholding documents on the Fast and
Furious scandal, but where do we go from here?
Not surprisingly, the Justice Department won’t prosecute Holder on the
charge, and Barack Obama would only take action if the attorney general became
a personal liability (and right now cutting him loose might be a
liability). Yet there is a way for
Congress to put bite in its bark.
It turns out that the House could encourage
immediate cooperation by arresting Holder.
Such a move would be based upon something called “inherent contempt,” a
process that, writes
The Washington Times, “is well-established
by precedent, has been confirmed by multiple Supreme Court rulings, and is
available to any Congress willing to force such a confrontation.” It was also recently alluded to by none other
than Nancy Pelosi when she addressed what she considered Karl Rove’s contempt
of Congress and said,
“I could have arrested Karl Rove on any given day. I’m not kidding. There’s a prison here in the Capitol…. If we had spotted him in the Capitol, we could
have arrested him.”
The problem, however, is that our Congress
is just not that confrontational. As
Constitution Project fellow Mort Rosenberg said,
while inherent contempt is constitutional, “[t]he House is scared to death to
use the inherent contempt power.
…They’re scared to death because the courts have said…the way the
contempt power is used is unseemly,” reports the Times.
“Unseemly.”
That’s an interesting word. If
you or I were held in contempt, would anyone bay the gendarmes and claim that shackling
us would be “unseemly”? Actually, it
would be downright humiliating. This is
why people generally hide their faces from cameras when doing that ignominious
walk to a squad car: it is, as it’s supposed to be, a bad experience. But it appears it is one that is only part of
the common man’s experience.
No one in America
As for being unseemly, what is so is
Holder’s behavior. What’s unseemly is a
system in which there is one standard for lowly me and another for lofty
thee. Eric Holder should be arrested for
one simple reason: he is currently one of the worst criminals I know of. To use a variation on a slogan the left once so
loved, Holder lied and people died.
Then there is the death of the rule of
law. One reason we have as much bad
behavior as we do among pseudo-elites is the same reason why child misbehavior
is now rampant: there is little fear of consequences. And this is because the consequences are
inconsequential. But high profiles
should come with high risk. If powerful public
officials knew they could be marched away in handcuffs to a fetid jail cell,
perhaps they’d take their oaths of office more seriously.
Of course, I don’t believe there has ever
been a civilization that treated those with clout exactly the same as those
without; there is no Purgatory on Earth.
But the size of the gap between the two types of treatment will always
be inversely proportional to the health of the civilization in question. I once had a Mexican tell me that Mexico America
Lest anyone think me naïve, I realize there
are many reasons why Holder won’t be arrested.
For one thing, such a move would be demonized by the media and might
redound negatively upon Republicans in the fall. Another is that few members of the ruling
class want to animate a hangman that could be used (perhaps wrongly) against
them in the future; once the mutual get-out-of-jail-free card is gone, it’s
gone.
Also remember that “conservatives”
are defenders of the status quo, not bold revolutionaries who overturn and
improve it. Yet all this is saying is
that people, being just people, will often subordinate transcendent but
seemingly remote principles to more ordinary but immediate concerns. But what does this beget? It begets a Justice John Roberts, who—likely
motivated by concern for the U.S.
Extreme Court
And that is the face of expediency. It’s like the Machiavellian leper character
in the film Braveheart, who claimed
that the ability to compromise—even with great principles at stake—makes a man
noble. But it does not, and creating de
facto nobility existing above the law makes a nation quite ignoble. Respect for station is no substitute for respect
for rule of law.
