4.50pm: So there we have it: Eric Holder will face contempt charges over the release of documents related to Face and Furious – although that would most likely be dropped if the documents were released and a deal reached.

One final thought for today.

4.35pm: Now Speaker of the House John Boehner weighs in, promising a vote of the full House of Representatives on the Eric Holder contempt charge sometime next week.

4.30pm: The Obama campaign has held a briefing to tell us that it expects to be outspent massively in the coming election. Here's AP's report:

Campaign officials said they expected Romney and a collection of Republican-leaning super PACs would spend roughly $1.2bn to help get him elected against a president who broke all fundraising records in 2008 by hauling in about $750m. The officials briefed White House and other political reporters only on condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal campaign strategy and polling data.

Underscoring the fundraising problems, one Obama campaign official predicted that Romney and the RNC would raise $100m in June, surpassing Obama's side again. But the official noted that Democrat John Kerry raised more than President George W Bush after locking up his party's nomination in the spring of 2004.

4.21pm: By 23 votes to 17, the House committee on government oversight votes along party lines to proceed with contempt proceedings against attorney general Eric Holder over the Fast and Furious investigation.

It now goes to the House and Senate – and it's likely to die in the Senate.

4.18pm: Finally: the House committee on government oversight is voting on contempt proceedings against Eric Holder.

3.50pm: Meanwhile, Joe the Plumber – also known as Samuel Wurzelbacher, Republican candidate for a congressional seat in Ohio – is hitting back at his critics unhappy at his casual equation between gun control and the Holocaust for an election ad.

Mmm. Yes, that'll do it. Wurzelbacher also spoke to ABC News:

Wurzelbacher said that he was merely stating historical facts and insisted "there is nothing offensive about it at all."

"I'm not saying gun control was causing the Holocaust in any shape or form and the people who are saying that are motivated by petty partisan poltiics," he told ABC News. "I believe ultimately the left, they hate history."

Let's assume that Samuel/Joe was just stating two unrelated facts and any association is just a liberal lie.

3.42pm: Still waiting on the House vote on contempt proceedings against Eric Holder. Must be the heat that's making them move so slowly.

3.21pm: A vote shortly on whether to push for contempt proceedings against attorney general Eric Holder, by the House committee on government oversight.

3.15pm: Mitt Romney's tame super pac Restore our Future raised $5m last month – and spent $4.8bn, reports the LA Times:

The pro-Romney super pac Restore Our Future pulled in nearly $5m in May, according to reports with the Federal Election Commission filed Wednesday, as the group pivoted to its general election battle against President Obama.

The group spent almost as much as it raised – $4.8m, the bulk of which went toward its "Mother's Day" ad buy in early May, which hammered Democrats for comments belittling Ann Romney's stay-at-home motherhood. The super pac ended the month with $8.4m in the bank.

Oh yes, the Mother's Day ad. Now, wasn't that a waste of money in hindsight? That $4.8m might come in handier in September or October.

3.09pm: Nancy Pelosi says the Republican attempt to call out Eric Holder for contempt is "strictly political," and says she could have done the same thing as Speaker but didn't:

I could have arrested Karl Rove on any given day. I'm not kidding. There's a prison here in the Capitol ... If we had spotted him in the Capitol, we could have arrested him.

Now you tell us Nancy Pelosi.

2.34pm: The House committee on government oversight is still arguing about the vote on whether or not to recommend attorney general Eric Holder for a contempt charge. It's expected to vote later this afternoon – and given the Republican majority, is likely to pass. Then it passes on to the full House of Representative for consideration.

2.13pm: Economist Justin Wolfers – Australia's finest export since Uggs – wants the Fed to take action:

Why not indeed. The reason? Politics, in part.

The Fed's latest forecast for economic growth this year is just 2.2%, a dire number of the Obama administration in an election year.

Meanwhile, my colleague Dominic Rushe is live blogging Ben Bernanke's press conference now.

1.27pm: Ahead of the supreme court ruling on healthcare reform – maybe tomorrow, maybe next week – we learn that three people die every hour in the US for lack of health insurance, according to a study by a pro-healthcare reform group:

More than 26,000 working-age adults die prematurely in the United States each year because they lack health insurance, according to a study published ahead of a landmark US Supreme Court ruling on President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law.

The study, released on Wednesday by the consumer advocacy group Families USA, estimates that a record high of 26,100 people aged 25 to 64 died for lack of health coverage in 2010, up from 20,350 in 2005 and 18,000 in 2000.

Here's a link to the study published by Families USA:

To estimate the number of Americans who are dying for lack of health coverage, Families USA applied the methodology developed by the Institute of Medicine to state-level population and mortality data. This is one measure of the great need for the Affordable Care Act. As our analysis shows, far too many Americans are, quite literally, dying for coverage.

1.03pm: For all the worthy complaints about how vice presidential speculation is pointless, the Atlantic's incomparable Molly Ball has a bracing reposte:

It is also fashionable to declare that this sort of speculation about the veepstakes is pointless and wasteful and serves no apparent interest. But look what we learned from the Rubio affair on Tuesday. We learned, above all, that Mitt Romney isn't particularly interested in putting Rubio on the ticket with him; that seems, if anything, truer today than it was yesterday: He had to be unwillingly pushed into feigning interest in his party's favorite running-mate candidate. But we also learned that Rubio has a powerful constituency in the Republican Party that Romney realizes he cannot afford to ignore or alienate; and we learned that Romney, realizing this, is susceptible to pressure. Even with the nomination in hand, Romney apparently remains sensitive to the potential for a backlash from the base.

12.40pm: The latest monthly statement from the Federal Reserve's federal open markets' committee lands – and there's a new promise of further action by the Fed if things get worse:

The Committee is prepared to take further action as appropriate to promote a stronger economic recovery and sustained improvement in labor market conditions in a context of price stability.

That's a significant change. Otherwise, the Fed statement tells us what we already know:

However, growth in employment has slowed in recent months, and the unemployment rate remains elevated. Business fixed investment has continued to advance. Household spending appears to be rising at a somewhat slower pace than earlier in the year. Despite some signs of improvement, the housing sector remains depressed.

Thank you, room full of people with doctorates from MIT. But here's the outlook, and it's not too cheery either:

The Committee expects economic growth to remain moderate over coming quarters and then to pick up very gradually. Consequently, the Committee anticipates that the unemployment rate will decline only slowly toward levels that it judges to be consistent with its dual mandate. Furthermore, strains in global financial markets continue to pose significant downside risks to the economic outlook. The Committee anticipates that inflation over the medium term will run at or below the rate that it judges most consistent with its dual mandate.

12.04pm: The White House is at pains to point out that claims of executive privilege are hardly extraordinary:

President Bill Clinton used executive privilege 14 times and President George Bush invoked it six times, officials said, including in cases that involved documents similar to those sought in the Fast and Furious congressional inquiry.

And as for contempt votes: they aren't unusual either.

11.36pm: More background on Fast and Furious and the war by memo between the House committee on govenment oversight and the department of justice, via AP:

During the committee's year-and-a-half-long investigation, the department has turned over 7,600 documents about the conduct of the Fast and Furious operation. However, because Justice initially told the committee falsely the operation did not use a risky investigative technique known as gun-walking, the panel has turned its attention from the details of the operation and is now seeking documents that would show how the department headquarters responded to the committee's investigation.

In Fast and Furious, agents of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Arizona abandoned the agency's usual practice of intercepting all weapons they believed to be illicitly purchased. Instead, the goal of gun-walking was to track such weapons to high-level arms traffickers, who had long eluded prosecution, and to dismantle their networks.

Gun-walking has long been barred by Justice Department policy, but federal agents in Arizona experimented with it in at least two investigations during the George Bush administration before Fast and Furious. These experiments came as the department was under widespread criticism that the old policy of arresting every suspected low-level "straw purchaser" was still allowing tens of thousands of guns to reach Mexico. A straw purchaser is an illicit buyer of guns for others.

11.18pm: There's an escalation in the rhetoric over the Fast and Furious investigation, with Speaker of the House John Boehner's spokesman making an inflamatory statement accusing the White House of "bending the law":

Until now, everyone believed that the decisions regarding Fast and Furious were confined to the Department of Justice. The White House decision to invoke executive privilege implies that White House officials were either involved in the Fast and Furious operation or the cover-up that followed. The administration has always insisted that wasn't the case. Were they lying, or are they now bending the law to hide the truth?

That's from Boehner's press secretary Brendan Buck, who appears not to understand that executive privilege encompasses the whole of the executive, not just the president.

Iowa senator Charles Grassley appears to suffer from the same idea, based on his statement this morning in reaction:

How can the President assert executive privilege if there was no White House involvement? How can the President exert executive privilege over documents he's supposedly never seen? Is something very big being hidden to go to this extreme?

11am: Hey, remember Joe The Plumber? No, me neither, but in 2008 he was very briefly famous for being touted as the embodiment of middle America by Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Now Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher – his real name – is running for Congress in Ohio and stakes an early claim for the worst and most offensive campaign ad of the 2012 election cycle. It has guns and the Holocaust – what could possibly go wrong? Here's Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

In the recent past, the Holocaust proved to be a troubling topic for some of the Republican candidates, but Wurzelbacher certainly had time to think about his message, which appears in his online campaign ad. In the video, the candidate is seen holding his gun, shooting vegetables and, in between, revealing his position that links gun control laws, the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide.

"In 1911, Turkey established gun control", he says. "From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were exterminated. In 1939, Germany established gun control. From 1939 to 1945, six million Jews and seven million others unable to defend themselves were exterminated."

At the end of the short video, he smiles lightly and concludes: "I love America."

The National Jewish Democratic Council President and CEO David Harris demanded Wurzelbacher apologize. "Using the memories of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust to make a political point is never appropriate, under any circumstances", he said.

10.32am: Here's the text of the letter sent from the department of justice to Darryl Issa this morning, from deputy attorney general James Cole, announcing the granting of executive privilege:

After you rejected the Department's recent offers of additional accommodations, you stated that the Committee intends to proceed with its scheduled meeting to consider a resolution citing the Attorney General for contempt for failing to comply with the Committee's subpoena of October 11, 2011. I write now to inform you that the President has asserted executive privilege over the relevant post-February 4, 2011, documents.

We regret that we have arrived at this point, after the many steps we have taken to address the Committee's concerns and to accommodate the Committee's legitimate oversight interests regarding Operation Fast and Furious. Although we are deeply disappointed that the Committee appears intent on proceeding with a contempt vote, the Department remains willing
to work with the Committee to reach a mutually satisfactory resolution of the outstanding issues.

By way of background: the House committee's investigation into Fast and Furious – a gun-running sting involving smuggled weapons across the US border to Mexican drug cartels that went badly wrong – has been continuing since early 2011, with Republicans alleging a cover-up by Eric Holder and the justice department.

Fast and Furious was designed to track illegal gun purchases along the Southwest border between Mexico and Arizona, to trace the guns to drug cartels. Disasterously, some 1,700 guns used in the operation were lost and some of the weapons have subsequently been discovered at crime scenes in Mexico. Two guns connected to Fast and Furious were found after a US Border Patrol agent was killed in Tucson in 2010.

10.15am: The White House has blocked access to documents detailing the government's response to Operation Fast and Furious, the botched gun-running sting, claiming executive privilege and attempting to thwart efforts by Republicans in Congress to hold US attorney general Eric Holder in contempt.

Darrell Issa – the Republican congressman who chairs the House oversight and government reform committee investigating Fast and Furious – had threatened Holder with contempt of Congress for what he regarded as a slow response by the justice department to comply with the committee's demands.

Today Holder and the Department of Justice have responded by successfully applying to the White House for a claim of executive privilege. Here's a copy of the letter Holder sent to the White House asking for executive privilege to be asserted over the documents requested by Issa's commitee, which relate not to Fast and Furious iteself but to the department's response to the investigation.

Isaa and the committee are holding a hearing this morning, and we'll be following developments.

Here's Ryan Devereaux's summary of other news:

• Mitt Romney denounced to reports that his campaign has not vetted Florida senator Marco Rubio. Speaking at an ice cream shop in Michigan on Tuesday, Romney said his team was "thoroughly vetting" Rubio. ABC News had earlier cited unnamed advisers indicating Rubio was not on the short list to be Romney's running mate, contrary to popular belief. Rubio himself, meanwhile, is not discussing the matter.

• Rubio, a rising star in the GOP, is seen as one of the party's last, best hope for securing the Hispanic vote. The Republicans suffered a major setback when last week President Obama announced he would not seek the deportation of young undocumented immigrants. In an effort to bounce back, the Republican National Committee has released a web video targetting Hispanic voters. The video makes the case that Hispanics are suffering because the economy is bad while Obama merely "plays politics".

• The Obama campaign, meanwhile, has released two new videos of its own, both painting Romney as a tax-raising governor who shipped American jobs overseas. Romney's team responded to the ads with a long research document listing tax cuts he made as governor of Massachusetts, while disputing the claim that he was directly involved in outsourcing.

• A new poll has Obama well ahead of Romney in terms of popularity. According to Bloomberg News, the president leads his challenger 53% to 40%, while 55% of the survey's respondents said Romney is the candidate most out of touch with the American people, as opposed to 36% who say that of the president. "Taken together, the results suggest an unsettled political environment for both Obama and Romney five months from the November election, with voters choosing for now to stick with a president they say is flawed rather than backing a challenger they regard as undefined and disconnected," Bloomberg reported.