The Heritage Foundation’s Tommy Binion, vice president of congressional and executive branch relations, joined Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” program to share his thoughts on congressional Democrats’ decision to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt in relation to the Mueller report.
Q: Tommy, how is it that they get Barr for contempt of Congress because he’s not going to give them the information that’s illegal for him to hand over, regardless. I mean, what kind of clown show is this going on?
A: It is a clown show. So that’s the case, right? So now that the president has asserted executive privilege if Attorney General Barr complied with the subpoena he would be guilty of a violation of federal law. So in the markup yesterday the Republicans added an amendment that says, to be clear in no way are we suggesting that the attorney general should violate the law, so to me the contempt resolution is meaningless but that’s also a microcosm of the larger ordeal here because the whole process is meaningless. They will hold the attorney general in contempt but at the end of the day Bill Barr and President Trump are going to disclose to Congress exactly only what it is that they want and they think is the correct thing to expose to Congress. Congress doesn’t really have a remedy that it’s willing to use. They could go to the courts, but that would take a long time. They could impeach him, but that’s against their political interests, so it’s a political game, a political theater; there isn’t actually a mechanism to enforce this subpoena that they’re willing to use so I don’t think anything is going to happen other than a whole lot of breathless news coverage because these words seem like weighty words — subpoena and contempt — but at the end of the day they don’t have a whole lot of effect.
Q: So is this I guess a ploy for fundraising? Maybe it looks good in an email slug?
A: I think that there is some damaging information about the behavior of President Obama and Clinton and James Comey in the Mueller report and I think that this is a distraction from that. I think that the jobs report that came out last week was fantastic, I think that the economy is humming and what the Democrats are left with is to try to sort of pinprick the president with all of these illusions and accusations that make it sort of seem like there’s a scandal here. But when you look under the hood there really isn’t a scandal there but it’s a lot of white noise; I think that it amounts to basically a political strategy to make it seem like Donald Trump is corrupt when he’s not, there’s no there there.
Q: It’s interesting. You wonder if there is a big silent majority in the Democratic Party who silently is saying, “Yes, impeach!”… “Just put Joe Biden in there and let’s get somebody who’s not a total fruitcake running this thing.”
A: The polls would certainly seem to indicate that. Joe Biden gets in the race and jumps up to a huge lead and it looks like the Democratic voters are like, “Yep, this sounds way more reasonable than what we’ve been hearing for the last few months. Let’s go with this guy.”
Q: Yeah. He’s winning in Massachusetts, Liz Warren can’t get a lead in Massachusetts. I think she’s close to dropping fourth in some polls.
A: And I think that is the danger in primaries, is that there is a tendency to go very far to the extreme, that’s where the activism is, that’s where the energy is on the left, is progressive socialism. I don’t know. Potentially what we’re seeing in the polls is that that’s not where the votes are.
