House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is privately begging Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) to slow down with her plan to try to have Attorney General Merrick Garland arrested — but seemingly to no avail.
According to Politico's Olivia Beavers, Johnson urged a delay during a GOP conference this week, but Luna "dug in" — and plans to move ahead with introducing the resolution on Wednesday.
All of this stems from a fight between House Republicans and Garland over the raw, unedited footage of President Joe Biden's interview with special counsel Robert Hur in the classified documents case, which resolved with no charges against Biden, but not without Hur publishing a report that sharply criticized the president's mental fitness.
House Republicans already received the complete transcript of the interview, but continue to demand the video footage, which the Biden administration invoked executive privilege on because it had no legitimate investigative purpose, and even some Republican members themselves have privately admitted they only wanted the footage to splice clips of Biden looking old and confused into campaign ads against him.
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After Garland refused to transmit the footage, the House GOP voted to refer him criminally for contempt of Congress — but as the Justice Department itself would be in charge of deciding whether to press charges, that referral went nowhere, and a subpoena or lawsuit to force the release of the footage appears unlikely to succeed.
Since then, Luna has been one of the top advocates of an archaic congressional procedure called "inherent contempt," where Congress would vote to instruct the sergeant-at-arms to physically arrest Garland and detain him until he complies with the House's demand to produce the footage. This puts many House Republicans in a tough position, as this power hasn't been used in nearly a hundred years and has generally been unenforceable or backfired whenever Congress has tried it.
