The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted last Wednesday to hold Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents requested by the Committee in connection with DOJ’s Fast and Furious gun-running scheme. Predictably, the vote split right down party lines.

The next step was this week’s floor vote by the full House of Representatives. Prior to Thursday’s vote, the Congressional Black Caucus had called an emergency meeting to coordinate their walk-out. Since Holder is black and Obama is black, this had to be a racial thing. In the end, 100 Democrats refused to vote, most of them by walking off the House floor. Yet 17 Democrats voted with the Republicans to hold Holder in contempt of Congress while two Republicans voted against the resolution – Steve LaTourette (R-OH) and Scott Rigell (R-VA). The motion carried 255 for and 67 against with one abstention. This marks the first time in history that an Attorney General has been held in contempt of either legislative chamber. On the day of the vote, Holder went to Disney World to give a speech and maybe catch a few rides.

“No Justice Department is above the law, and no Justice Department is above the Constitution,” said House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-OH). Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who spoke for the Democrats, pled with her caucus to vote against the contempt resolution, while assuring the House chamber that her party’s members were equally interested in getting justice for the family of Brian Taylor. The slain agent’s name is Brian Terry.

With passage of the contempt resolution in the full House, and Pelosi’s assurance that the Democrats want justice for whatshisname, it will now be referred to the US attorney for the District of Columbia, who is required to call a grand jury, ask for an indictment, and then represent the House Committee in the ensuing trial. However, he was appointed by Obama and reports to Holder as his boss. Therefore, he will predictably inform the Committee Chairman that he will not prosecute the man to whom he reports. This will force a second floor vote of the full House to authorize Committee Chairman Issa (R-CA) to file suit on behalf of the House of Representatives in US District Court directing Holder to obey the subpoena of documents. Holder will lose. But all of this will take time and likely put the court arguments into next year after the election. That was the plan all along.

As the contempt proceeding chugs along in the legal system, it won’t be fun for Holder, however. Apart from the distraction, he could lose his license and in the worst case, go to prison for two years. So last week, just as he was about to walk the plank, King Obama intervened prior to the Committee vote and announced by letter to Chairman Issa that he would be invoking executive privilege. The vote happened anyway, but this is where, as Alice said in Wonderland, things got “curiouser and curiouser.”

The assertion of executive privilege is a throwback to the powers of English kings, who were annoyed by the meddling of Parliament in the conduct of statecraft in the same way that Obama is annoyed with having to co-govern with Congress. The use of executive privilege by American presidents goes back to George Washington, but it has always been used sparingly. And, except in the case of Nixon, it has not been used to hide a crime.

George W. Bush invoked executive privilege only six times in eight years. Clinton used it 14 times in eight years. Obama, who hopefully won’t have eight years, has never used it – until now. Why now in regards to this failed Fast and Furious policy? After all, it’s an election year. Why draw attention to a gun sting and its botched execution?

Who’s paying attention to it? Only those who get their news from the alternative media. The mainstream media has covered it up. Now the MSM will be forced to carry the story, if for no other reason than to show what bad guys the Republicans are for trying to embarrass Obama politically.

Uninformed voters will now start asking, “What the heck is ‘Fast and Furious’ and why is the President covering it up?” Polls are already beginning that show by a two to one margin voters believe that Obama shouldn’t have invoked executive privilege.

The invocation of privilege is therefore curious – or curiouser, in Alician terms.

Holder’s excuse for refusing to relinquish the documents requested by the House Committee is that they are part of an ongoing investigation. If that’s the case, it would be inexplicable and illegal for DOJ officials and White House advisors to discuss an ongoing investigation or to reveal related documents to the White House staff. Technically the DOJ represents the American people, not the President, so why would anyone need protection? A case and its documents may only be discussed among people involved in the investigation. Legally, that would exclude the White House staff and the President himself.

The White House has claimed all along that their guy wasn’t involved, so Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), who has worked with Issa to try to get answers out of Holder, correctly observed, “How can the president assert executive privilege if there was no White House involvement? How can the president exert executive privilege over documents he’s supposedly never seen? Is something very big being hidden to go to this extreme?”

Good question.

As I blogged last month on Fast and Furious in Part I and Part II, the real purpose of this debacle was about limiting the Second Amendment rights of citizens to own and carry guns, a constitutional provision hated by both Holder and Obama. Leaks are beginning to corroborate this. The way Fast and Furious was conducted – letting guns “walk” across the Mexican border where drug lords used them to conduct murder and mayhem – makes no sense unless there were a higher purpose: to indict gun trafficking and thereby indict the easy availability of guns in America. If successful, it would lead to gun control.

Look at these excerpts from Obama’s book, Audacity of Hope, to get a sense of his attitude toward guns:

In certain parts of Illinois, the mention of gun control constitutes sacrilege… people feel about their guns as they feel about their library books … we continue to argue about reasonable search and whether the Second Amendment prohibits gun regulation … I believe keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers’ lobby.

Are these the words of a moralist obsessed with gun violence? Gun violence is an outcome. Gun control is a method. No, they are the words of a politician for whom gun control, if not gun elimination, became a political, and likely deeply emotional, issue.

First, a little background. Meet Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL), a high school dropout who joined the Army, went AWOL, and yet managed to get an honorable discharge. Rush founded the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, named his son after Huey Newton (a noted Panther), was almost killed in a police raid on a Panther meeting, served time in prison for illegally carrying a firearm. In 1999 his son was murdered in a contract “hit” for reneging on a drug deal he’d been paid $100,000 to deliver. Rush thereafter got gun religion and has been a steadfast opponent of guns since, introducing bill after bill in the US House in an attempt to neutralize the Second Amendment. He recently appeared at the House podium dressed in a hoodie and sunglasses while delivering a speech after Trayvon Martin was killed – a stunt that got him escorted out of the House chamber for violating its rules.

In 2000 then-State Senator Obama challenged Rush for the open House seat Rush now holds. In their debates, Rush called Obama “an educated fool,” who wasn’t sufficiently rooted in the black neighborhoods of south Chicago, where Obama had only a 10% name recognition. Obama countered that he could build bridges to whites, and indeed, he was the candidate of choice for whites, living as he did among them in the Hyde Park suburbs of Chicago where streets were safer and the University of Chicago was located.

Prior to the congressional seat election, State Senator Obama had supported a bipartisan bill called the Safe Neighborhoods Act, which would have made carrying a gun a felony in Illinois instead of the misdemeanor it was at the time. As we have seen so often in the Obama presidency, he took a vacation in Hawaii and was absent on the crucial day of the vote. The measure failed by three votes – one of them the vote of missing-in-action Obama. His enemies and the media pounced on him for his legislative indolence in gun control and he lost to Rush, who had made it a key issue, by 30% to 60%.

According to Edward Klein’s new book, The Amateur, the defeat almost cost him his marriage. Michelle considered divorcing him – what a woman – and stopped speaking to him. Obama went into a deep funk. Depressed and in debt, his friends were concerned that he was suicidal. When he won the seat for the US Senator for Illinois, however, things were hunky-dory with Michelle, my belle – especially when he hardly warmed his new seat before he launched a campaign to become President of the United States! … which would show his wife that he could be the man she wanted him to be.

Most of us learn from our mistakes, and some of those mistakes leave lasting emotional scars. His embarrassing loss to Bobby Rush caused Obama to confront his identity. Who was he? Read his books. He decided that he was a half-white black man rather than a half-black white man. Therefore, he moved to the political left and embraced the leading left causes – racism, poverty, big government solutions and regulation, and of course, gun control, the issue that had cost him dearly the only election he’s ever lost.

In the heady days of the new Obama administration, Secretary Hillary, Holder, and Obama formed a veritable Greek chorus in asserting that Mexican drug violence was being fueled by guns purchased in the US. DOJ memos and emails show that their real agenda was to use Mexican drug violence as a red herring to win public support for gun control, including a tight interpretation of the Second Amendment. One email spoke of tying the flow of guns – which Holder’s agency facilitated – to a justification for an assault weapons ban. In 1995, Eric Holder spoke to a Women’s National Democratic Club event, saying we must convince people that it’s unacceptable to carry guns, that we must “brainwash” people in to thinking quite differently about guns.

Fast and Furious was the Obama administration’s way of accomplishing the American mindset change about guns. The fact that a couple of hundred Mexicans were killed in their gambit and the fact that the President of Mexico was unaware the US DOJ was funneling guns into the murder machine seemed to cause none of the operation’s leaders pause. But when two American agents were killed, the agents’ disgusted colleagues blew the whistle on Fast and Furious and Congress got involved, demanding an explanation.

Holder’s response was that Inspectors General are inspecting and ongoing investigations are ongoing. But it was obvious that he was covering up a larger fiasco than a failed government operation. He stonewalled the House Oversight Committee, refusing to release documents that would show his culpability – and perhaps Obama’s – in a greater anti-gun scheme. Several times he has had to correct his prior statements, including accusing the Bush Attorney General of knowing about the operation and letting it continue until he, Holder, stepped in and ordered a halt. Senator Grassley rose in high dungeon, demanding proof of this scurrilous accusation. But Holder was unable to produce any, so he had to retract his misspeaking.

Holder and Obama couldn’t get their stories straight, causing one to contradict the other about who knew what and when. When the stonewalling strategy became blatant, Issa drew a line in the sand with a date, causing Holder to appeal to Obama to invoke privilege. In a sense, it was a shrewd move. Either Obama will be out of office, and the American people have shown little patience for going after the sins of the previous administration, or Obama and Holder will be able to delay the court fight until after Obama is reelected, even if he ultimately loses and Holder is forced to resign.

Throughout the mounting confrontation, the weak-willed John Boehner has shown his reluctance to allow another constitutional crisis reminiscent of the Clinton lying scandal which led to the House impeachment and a Senate show-trial that was worthy of an Academy Award for best acting. The 1996 election cost the Republicans enough seats to lose their majority and Clinton survived the crisis he had caused. Thus Boehner’s support of Issa’s Committee has been tepid to say the least.

This speaks volumes about Boehner’s ineptitude for the Speakership position. He fails to recognize that Clinton’s crime was obstruction of justice by lying under oath – a relatively benign misdeed when placed beside quite possibly a criminal cover-up of a government sting operation which may have had a politically motivated agenda that got two federal agents killed. OSHA does a better job of investigating accidental deaths than the DOJ has done investigating two murders which it likely caused.

The foot-dragging and invocation of presidential privilege should have caused Boehner to realize that unhappy circumstances arise in every human enterprise which require a leader to get out in front and lead even when he doesn’t like the outcome that will likely occur. This is one of them. The fact that he doesn’t see it as such puts his fitness to lead the Republican caucus in question.

The Eric Holder affair and Obama’s executive privilege cover-up is not a political or election year issue as Democrats claim. It’s a moral issue. And the families of Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata deserve answers.

Were their sons killed by criminals – or politicians?