Johnson's latest conservative problem: How hard to hit the Justice Department

House Republicans are escalating their standoff with the Justice Department — but it’s still going to fall short of hardliner demands.

Republicans on the Judiciary Committee voted on Thursday to recommend Attorney General Merrick Garland be held in contempt of Congress after the Justice Department refused to hand over the audio of former special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with President Joe Biden. Republicans on the Oversight Committee are expected to take the same step on Thursday night.

It’s just one prong of a revived push by Republicans to try to use their narrow majority to rein in the Justice Department, which they became increasingly critical of during Donald Trump’s presidency. In addition to the contempt vote, GOP lawmakers are actively discussing how they can take additional steps against the DOJ, including special counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the federal prosecution of the former president.

“There’s a lot of different ideas being discussed right now on what that would look like,” Speaker Mike Johnson said about the GOP conversations on Smith in particular. “We haven’t yet come to a consensus.”

Johnson faces a delicate balancing act: His majority runs through a swath of Biden-district Republicans and other centrists who have been uneasy about their colleagues’ push to punish the Justice Department since taking over the House last year. But his outspoken hardliners want to see the Lousianian use the full force of the majority to fight a department they view as increasingly politicized.

So far, the former camp has kept its distance from the fight. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said on Thursday that he needed more information on the contempt effort but “I think it’s important for Americans to hear this tape.”

Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) added that Congress has “important” work to do “but going after the attorney general isn’t one of them.”

Even if House Republicans can successfully pass an effort to hold Garland in contempt of Congress, that likely won’t satisfy the right flank. The White House notified lawmakers on Thursday that Biden was asserting executive privilege over the audio of Biden’s interview with Hur — effectively precluding Garland from facing criminal charges over defying the two congressional subpoenas.

The contempt resolutions still need to pass the House, and leadership hasn’t yet indicated when they will bring them to the floor. Republicans need near unity to get a contempt resolution through the chamber given all but guaranteed unanimous opposition from Democrats.

Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), in a brief interview, didn’t rule out suing Garland and the Justice Department for the audio recordings — an avenue that could take months, if not years, to resolve.

“We just want the information,” Jordan said, adding that “everything’s on the table.”

Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) also hinted on Thursday shortly before his committee was scheduled to meet that they could soon take their fight to court.

But some Republicans are pushing for more. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) offered a resolution to hold Garland in “inherent contempt” — a rarely used tool that would let the House sergeant-at-arms take Garland into custody for a congressional proceeding.

“Attorney General Garland’s refusal to turn over the subpoenaed information is not just an insult to the House of Representatives, but a direct threat to our constitutional republic,” Luna said when she introduced the resolution.

Republicans are requesting the Hur-Biden audio as part of a sweeping impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, which has largely focused on the business dealings of his family. That impeachment effort has stalled, but several Republicans invoked the continuing investigation on Thursday as they tried to make their case for why they need the audio.

“This is an impeachment inquiry. … We are investigating very legitimate questions,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas). “It is critically important for the purposes of this body to determine where we’re going to go with an impeachment inquiry, or any legislative inquiry, to determine what the president’s demeanor was during that interview.”

And even as a growing number of Republicans acknowledge they won’t have the votes to actually impeach Biden, some conservatives are still pushing for leadership and key investigators to at least draft impeachment articles.

“I think there’s evidence for different articles than we might have induced,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said.

The Justice Department has turned over the transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur and has made other documents referenced in his report available. But officials have raised myriad concerns about handing over the audio, including that it could negatively impact cooperation with future investigations. They also said Republicans hadn’t made an adequate case for what they would get from the audio that they couldn’t get from the transcript.

“The Committees’ needs are plainly insufficient to outweigh the deleterious effects that productions of the recordings would have on the integrity and effectiveness of similar law enforcement investigations in the future,” Garland wrote in a letter to Biden on Wednesday.

Democrats also accused Republicans of focusing on Hur’s findings to try to revive a politically motivated impeachment effort. And they believe the GOP wants the audio so that it can be used by the Trump campaign in ads heading into the November election.

“Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Why do my Republican colleagues need this audio file at all? …They think they can manipulate President Biden’s voice to make it to the next Trump for president ad,” Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) said on Thursday.

It’s not just Garland that is coming under the House GOP’s growing Justice Department microscope.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is pushing for Johnson to defund Smith — which the speaker has acknowledged is unlikely to happen even as he’s left the door open to taking other steps. That move has sparked heartburn from some of the Georgia Republican’s centrist colleagues, like Bacon.

Johnson said this week that he is working with Jordan and Comer on other steps that House Republicans could take to rein in the special counsel. He did not provide any details on what those are or when they would be unveiled.

Jordan was a little more talkative. He told POLITICO that he floated an idea to Johnson: Placing limits on when a special counsel could investigate a current or former president. What that would look like in practice is unclear — the Ohio Republican noted that could potentially mean restricting when they could investigate or requiring a vote of Congress before a probe. Jordan stressed that he was just spitballing, however.

“I mentioned it to the speaker a week ago when he asked me about it on the floor,” Jordan said, adding that they routinely keep the speaker’s office in the loop on the committee’s investigations.

But those discussions have done little to stop Greene from firing off.

“What power does Mike Johnson have? He has power over federal issues and federal cases such as the Department of Justice,” Greene said. “Instead of doing something about that and actually about it and actually trying to do something about Jack Smith, he jumps on an airplane … flies up to New York and runs up there to pretend that he cares about the weaponized government.”