After authorizing their inquiry, Republicans could slow-walk a Biden impeachment vote

WASHINGTON — House Republicans are charging ahead with their investigation into President Joe Biden’s family business dealings, with some in the GOP predicting a formal impeachment vote in the opening months of 2024.

But there are others in the party who say the process could be drawn out, running deep into the presidential election year as legal fights over subpoenas for documents and depositions play out in the courts.

And there are Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill who share a third view: Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., might never even bring an impeachment vote to the floor due to a lack of evidence, a lack of GOP votes, or both.

“If I had $100 and a chance to bet to turn it into a million dollars, I don’t know that I’d risk losing that $100 on this process,” said one GOP member who previously served in leadership. “Bottom line: I don’t know how it’s gonna turn out.”

“One of the possibilities is that they don’t force a vote on articles of impeachment because they don’t have articles of impeachment,” added a senior House Democratic aide who is closely tracking the GOP’s impeachment efforts.

The triumvirate of top GOP investigators — Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio, Oversight Chairman James Comer of Kentucky and Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith of Missouri — has kicked up a cloud of ethical doubt around the Bidens but has yet to turn up any concrete evidence of wrongdoing or influence-peddling by the president himself.

Even Republicans are conceding they haven’t seen any evidence of Biden’s alleged high crimes and misdemeanors.

“I haven’t seen any yet, to date, that shows me that the president did anything wrong,” Rep. Dave Joyce of Ohio, a former longtime county prosecutor and the leader of the centrist Republican Governance Group, said in an interview. “We’ve gone through the process of indicting President Biden and the members of the Biden family, but we’ve not seen any of the evidence yet that gives weight to the indictment.”

Another GOP skeptic, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, warned that an overtly politicized impeachment could backfire on his own party.

"If this is perceived as being a revenge impeachment or a politicized impeachment ... it will hurt the Republicans," Bacon said during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press NOW" Wednesday. "If we don’t handle this right and if it looks like we’re using it as a political weapon, it will come back to bite us all."

Still, both Bacon and Joyce said they voted, along with every other Republican, to launch the impeachment inquiry earlier this month to empower investigators to get more information from the Biden family and the administration.

Echoes of Benghazi

Though it would infuriate the party's conservative base, slow-walking an impeachment vote — or putting it off completely — could prove to be a politically useful strategy for the GOP.

Like House Republicans’ special Benghazi investigation that dogged Democrat Hillary Clinton throughout the 2016 campaign cycle (and wasn’t shut down until after Trump defeated her), the newly authorized impeachment probe could torment Biden through the November election, and serve as GOP counter-programing to his likely opponent Donald Trump’s civil and criminal trials in New York, Washington, D.C., Florida and Georgia. Trump’s federal classified documents case is slated to go to trial in May, while the Georgia prosecutor in Trump’s election interference case, Fani Willis, wants a trial in August.

A recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll found that Americans are now evenly split on the Biden impeachment probe, with 49% supporting it and 48% opposing it. In the same poll in October, 47% supported the probe, while 52% opposed it. And nearly 7 in 10 voters believe Biden has acted either illegally or unethically in his son’s business dealings, according to AP-NORC poll from October.

Punting a vote altogether would also be an electoral godsend to vulnerable Republicans who have been reluctant to back their party’s aggressive impeachment push. Since the Dec. 13 unanimous GOP inquiry vote, the Democratic campaign arm has blasted out stories and statements attacking the 17 Republicans who represent swing districts that Biden won in 2020 for “caving to MAGA extremists and Donald Trump.”

At a recent news conference, Speaker Johnson declined to discuss the possibility that Republicans might not file articles of impeachment against Biden.

“We’re not going to prejudge the outcome of this,” the speaker replied. “We can’t because, again, it’s not a political calculation.”

Rep. Ted Lieu of California, a member of the Democratic leadership team who served as an impeachment manager in Trump’s second Senate trial, argued that the GOP’s Benghazi probe was the wrong comparison. He said the Biden impeachment inquiry is more similar to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, which boosted Clinton’s approval ratings and caused the GOP to lose seats in the 1998 midterms, forcing then-Speaker Newt Gingrich to resign.

“I believe Joe Biden’s numbers will rise as a result of this impeachment because it continues to show that Republicans are focused on priorities very few Americans care about,” Lieu said in an interview outside the Capitol.

“Democrats will focus on lowering costs and creating jobs, and they’re focused on baseless impeachment,” he added. “So, as long as they keep talking about impeachment, that keeps helping Democrats and Joe Biden.”

A tough math problem

Skepticism about the GOP’s evidence from Joyce, retiring Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., and others is making an already difficult math problem for the speaker even more complicated. This month, the House expelled indicted Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., and Johnson’s predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, is resigning from Congress and won’t be back in the New Year. It means that Johnson can only afford to lose three GOP votes to pass anything on the floor, including a resolution to impeach Biden which would force a Senate trial that is almost certain to end in acquittal, given the Democratic majority.

Johnson’s miniscule majority could be cut to just two seats after Rep. Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, resigns in the first quarter of 2024 to become a college president, and if former Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi wins back his old seat in a Feb. 13 special election to fill the Santos vacancy.

Conservative Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., said a vote to impeach Biden “needs to be in the first quarter” but only if the evidence is there.

“I’m talking about real evidence — not manufactured evidence,” said Loudermilk, a vocal critic of the two Donald Trump impeachments. “You just got to have really hard evidence.”

As on the inquiry vote, Democrats are expected to be united in their opposition to a future impeachment vote. And Loudermilk predicted that if 218 GOP votes don’t materialize, Johnson won’t bring it to the floor. There are serious concerns that if an impeachment vote fails on the floor, it would amount to a GOP exoneration of Biden after a yearlong investigation.

“I think if the evidence is not there, then probably the speaker wouldn’t bring it forward,” the Georgia congressman said. “We’re trying to do it by the books. The Democrats lowered the constitutional bar on impeachment; we’ve got to raise it back.”

No timeline for a vote

Key Republicans appear to be in no rush for a quick impeachment vote.

“I don’t want to predict that,” Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., the incoming chairman of the far-right Freedom Caucus, said of the timing of a vote.

Smith, the Ways and Means chair who’s spent months probing the president’s son Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes and whether the Biden Justice Department interfered in an IRS probe into the son, also gave no firm timeline.

“There’s a lot of information we need to get,” Smith told NBC News. “It’s hard to put a timeline on it. It depends on how cooperative the administration and the witnesses will be with us because they have not been.”

“It needs to take as long as it needs to take in order to get it right,” added Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla. “So I don’t have any preconceived notion of whether that’s next week or next year.”

The House's vote to formalize the impeachment inquiry was designed to help investigators enforce subpoenas to gather more evidence. Jordan, the Judiciary Committee chairman and Trump loyalist who previously served on the Benghazi committee, already has his top targets. He wants to depose Jack Morgan and Mark Daly, two low-level attorneys in the DOJ’s tax division who, IRS whistleblowers had said, initially believed that Hunter Biden should be indicted on felony tax charges. Under a plea deal, prosecutors recommended a sentence of probation in exchange for the Biden son pleading guilty to tax violations, but that deal fell apart in August.

This month, special counsel David Weiss indicted Hunter Biden on nine tax-related charges, including three felony counts.

"DOJ has refused to let us talk to those guys,” Jordan said of Morgan and Daly. “So, we think with this official inquiry, we got a better chance of talking to those two individuals who were the only two people in the investigation that we haven’t deposed yet.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com