[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 98 (Wednesday, June 27, 2012)]
[House]
[Pages H4073-H4074]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    SOME DAYS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Illinois (Mr. Davis) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DAVIS of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, U2 has a song, ``Some Days Are 
Better Than Others.'' The lyrics go something like this:

       Some days are dry. Some days are leaky. Some days come 
     clean. Other days are sneaky. Some days take less, but most 
     days take more. Some slip through your fingers and onto the 
     floor.

  Well, Mr. Speaker, today it is certainly threatening to slip through 
onto the floor. The House is apparently preparing for an unprecedented 
floor vote to hold a sitting Attorney General, the Nation's chief law 
enforcement officer, in contempt. The path that has led us to this 
sorry day is so long, so bizarre, so tortuous, so fantastical, so 
unbelievable that it stretches the imagination of individuals to try to 
make some sense out of our actions.
  The Oversight Committee started out investigating the so-called ``gun 
walking'' which was initiated under the Bush administration. The 
Department of Justice produced thousands of pages of documents. The 
Attorney General testified nine times, and the committee found no 
wrongdoing by the Attorney General.
  So the committee majority turned its attention to a February 4, 2011, 
letter sent by the Department of Justice to Senator Grassley, initially 
denying allegations of gun walking. The DOJ acknowledged the errors in 
the letter

[[Page H4074]]

to Senator Grassley and provided more than 1,300 pages of internal 
documents showing how the letter came to be drafted. The documents 
demonstrated that the staff did not intentionally mislead Congress but 
relied on assurances from ATF leaders and officials in Arizona who ran 
the operation.
  Did the committee call the head of the ATF, Ken Melson, to testify as 
to how this happened, as Democratic members of the committee requested? 
The answer is no. Did the committee call former Attorney General 
Mukasey, who was briefed on the botched effort to coordinate arms 
interdiction with Mexico in 2007? The answer is no.
  Instead, the majority members demanded more internal deliberative 
documents from the Department of Justice after the Grassley letter had 
been sent. Instead, the committee leadership made an ever-escalating 
series of allegations regarding the involvement of the White House, 
documented in YouTube videos and news clips viewed on the Internet, 
which were subsequently withdrawn. The committee leadership has refused 
the Attorney General's offer to resolve the conflict.
  The President has now claimed executive privilege over a very narrow 
group of documents from the Department of Justice in response to 
Chairman Issa's threat to hold the Attorney General in contempt of 
Congress. This is the first time the President has claimed executive 
privilege, in sharp contrast to recent previous Presidents who used the 
claim on numerous occasions in similar circumstances.
  Should the House continue to pursue this irresponsible action, it is 
likely that it would lead to many years of judicial action and would, 
of course, further poison the highly charged partisan atmosphere 
leading up to the elections and critical decisions regarding the 
Federal budget and all of the other things that we really seriously 
need to deal with.
  So I join with others who are asking the Speaker, who are imploring 
this House not to take such an irresponsible vote, not to take an 
irresponsible action, but to sit with the Attorney General, and let's 
resolve the conflict between the House and the executive branch. That's 
what reasonable people would do.

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