He hates his life – or at least, he’s about to hate his life. You see, if Congress votes today to hold US Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal contempt of Congress today for Holder’s stonewalling on providing documents on the botched Operation Fast & Furious botched gunrunning scandal* then Mr. Machen is apparently the lucky individual who gets to bring charges up for a grand jury. Assuming, of course, that Holder doesn’t blink before then and give House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa the documents that Issa’s been demanding ever since Holder got caught lying about the Department of Justice’s oversight of Operation Fast & Furious.

All of this puts Machen in an absolutely no-win situation: if the US Attorney brings charges, Machen will get an unbelievable amount of push-back from both the administration (which will be passive-aggressive) and the DC local political structure (which will just be aggressive). But if Ronald Machen does not bring charges then his career is over; the DC federal power structure values obedience to Congressional prerogatives a heck of a lot more than they value obedience to Presidential ones. Presidents are ephemeral; even the successful ones have less than a decade of true power. Congress endures, and it gets mean when it’s crossed.

My sympathies are, as they say, muted.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Short version: the USA allowed and encouraged the illegal sale of firearms to Mexican narco-terrorist groups; didn’t bother to keep track of the guns; didn’t tell the Mexican government that we were doing this; watched calmly as said narco-terrorist groups used their new guns to murder hundreds or thousands of Mexican nationals; and only went into panicked, CYA mode when two Fast & Furious guns showed up at the murder scene of American Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Somebody needs to go to jail for all of this, and Eric Holder has been spending the last two years fighting any and all attempts by Congress to try to find out who. Draw your own conclusions from that.