When ‘No’ Means ‘No’ -- Lois Lerner willfully and knowingly exposed herself to a contempt vote.

From C. Boyden Gray at National Review:

First, about the facts: There can be no serious dispute that Ms. Lerner knew that the committee had rejected her refusal to testify, as Hans von Spakovsky recounted on National Review Online recently. She could have held no reasonable doubts about this, after the committee passed the resolution rejecting her invocation of the Fifth Amendment and directing her to testify, let alone after the committee reminded her of that fact in its February 2014 letter recalling her to testify.

Second, Ms. Lerner’s defenders are wrong on the law. Representative Cummings asserts in his letter to Speaker Boehner that the committee cannot hold Ms. Lerner in contempt because the committee did not demonstrate to Ms. Lerner the “certainty” that “a contempt prosecution was inevitable.”

It strains credulity to suggest that an eventual contempt prosecution must be “inevitable” in order for a witness to be held in contempt at the outset of the process. After all, the committee itself has no power to prosecute the witness for contempt. As the House Counsel’s office explained, in a memorandum affirming the Chairman’s position, it is impossible for the committee ever to guarantee prosecution: The committee can only vote to recommend to the full House that Ms. Lerner be held in contempt, after which it falls to the full House to vote on the recommendation. And even then the matter is subject to the discretion of the U.S. Attorney to present the matter to the grand jury for indictment. (It is worth recalling that the House voted in 2012 to hold the attorney general in contempt, for his refusal to comply with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena for documents regarding the “Fast and Furious” gunrunning scandal — and the U.S. Attorney has never prosecuted him.)

And in fact, the law sensibly does not require such a showing of “certainty” in order for the committee to begin the contempt process. The Supreme Court’s leading cases on this question — Quinn v. United States (1955), Emspak v. United States (1955), and Bart v. United States (1955) — certainly require no such thing. Rather, as the Court explained in Quinn, Ms. Lerner merely must be “clearly apprised that the committee demands [her] answer notwithstanding [her] objections” before she can be convicted for contempt. (And again, Ms. Lerner is not yet being convicted, or even prosecuted for contempt — she is merely being considered for a committee vote to recommend that she be held in contempt.) Even at this early stage in the process, the record shows that the committee easily satisfies that standard.

Lerner is counting on Holder NOT pursuing the case. The strategy is delay, delay, delay, hoping everyone will forget about it.