The Fast and Furious investigation has finally handed House Republicans a prize they’ve long sought: a legal smackdown of the Obama administration.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was able to show skeptical conservatives that his spine could stay stiff under pressure from President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder by locking arms with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on a contempt of Congress vote Wednesday. There was no daylight — at least publicly — between Boehner and Issa, a dynamic the White House was desperately seeking.
But the victories could come with a cost. House Republicans’ hot pursuit of Holder doesn’t exactly line up with Mitt Romney’s message, which he wants to keep focused on the economy. And Obama’s campaign wants to tie Romney to what he considers an extreme Republican majority.
The White House, President Barack Obama’s campaign and their allies on Capitol Hill seem to relish this battle — even though the administration will be portrayed as though it’s hiding reams of information.
Obama’s calculation: Republicans’ rejection of Holder’s final document offer — which would’ve prevented the committee contempt vote — again paints the GOP majority as distracted by issues peripheral to the sagging economy and stubbornly high unemployment.
The Obama campaign immediately began crowing about how it “look[s] forward to a debate with Mitt Romney about transparency and how he erased his hard drives as governor of Massachusetts and refuses to release his tax returns, reveal his campaign bundlers, say how he’d pay for his tax plan, or make public his fundraisers.”
An administration official said the congressional GOP is “sitting on its hands … not doing one thing to impact on this economy in a positive way.”
Despite his calls for Holder to resign, Mitt Romney is not going to talk about the party’s investigation into how guns got into the hands of cartels in Mexico. He plans to leave the matter to congressional Republicans. Andrea Saul, a campaign spokeswoman, didn’t even mention Fast and Furious in a one-sentence comment. “President Obama’s pledge to run the most open and transparent administration in history has turned out to be just another broken promise,” she said.
The Romney campaign has long believed that every day in which the economy is at the center of the news cycle, it wins. Any day talking about something else, it loses.
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