House Republicans Lurch Toward Impeachment Inquiry Against Joe Biden
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WASHINGTON ― House Republicans may soon pull the trigger on the ultimate weapon they can wield against President Joe Biden: impeachment.
The party’s itch for revenge over the dualimpeachments of former President Donald Trump is leading them headlong toward pursuing the same thing, despite repeatedly failing to deliver evidence of Biden’s purported wrongdoing, and despite the risk of an electoral backlash.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) suggested this week that Republicans would move forward with an impeachment inquiry after they return from their August recess next month.
“When you move to an impeachment inquiry, it empowers Congress, Republicans and Democrats, within their subpoena to be able to get the answers they need,” McCarthy said Monday in an interview on Fox News.
McCarthy has stressed that Republicans at this point only plan to pursue an impeachment inquiry, rather than an actual vote of impeachment on the House floor, as a means of escalating their investigations into the Bidens. But that distinction likely won’t appease House conservatives, many of whom already want to see Biden impeached.
“I personally intend on filing our own impeachment resolution just based on the corruption and bribery information that’s been brought forward to the House,” Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) said in a Tuesday interview with Fox News Business. “It is long past time to start the impeachment process.”
Democrats faced their own internal debates over whether to begin impeachment proceedings against Trump in 2019. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other Democratic leaders were initially hesitant to announce an impeachment inquiry, despite special counsel Robert Mueller all but asking them to. But the full House voted to authorize impeachment articles, on charges of abuse of power and obstructing a congressional investigation, just a few months after the impeachment inquiry began.
In theory, as McCarthy said, a House impeachment probe could both encourage executive branch agencies to cooperate with information requests, and make courts more amenable to ordering the executive branch to comply.
Republicans have claimed that the president is entangled in his son’s past business dealings with foreign nationals in Ukraine and China. Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company called Burisma at the same time that his father, as vice president during the Obama administration, pushed for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor.
Trump pursued the same allegation against the Bidens in 2019, and even tried to coerce the government of Ukraine into announcing a sham investigation. During the subsequent impeachment proceedings against Trump, a parade of senior State Department officials testified that firing the prosecutor was a U.S. foreign policy priority, not something Biden came up with on his own.
Over the past few months, Republicans have routinely claimed that new evidence implicates the president, but a close reading of their material shows that it doesn’t. House oversight committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) claimed last week, for instance, that a former business partner of Hunter Biden testified that he witnessed Burisma honchos telling Hunter to make his father fire the prosecutor. The transcript revealed that Comer misrepresented the testimony.
Still, Republicans hope that keeping the Biden family in the news will drag down the president’s poll numbers and make it harder for the president to tout “Bidenomics” or low unemployment and declining rates of inflation.
“The more voters hear about the Biden family corruption scandal, the further you will see Biden’s trustworthiness rating slip,” a Republican strategist said, requesting anonymity to discuss party strategy. “It’s already torching Democrats’ ability to sell ‘Bidenomics’ or any other policy to the American people.”
Doug Heye, a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, suggested that Republicans would be playing with fire by moving to impeach Biden right now. The party’s impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton famously backfired, boosting Clinton’s approval rating and helping Democrats in the 1998 midterms.
“It’s hard to see a scenario where focusing on something only a narrow part of the base wants to see, at the expense of all the things that have put Biden’s numbers so low, would help,” Heye told HuffPost.
While impeaching Biden might excite the party base, there’s no guarantee House Republicans would actually have the votes to pull it off. McCarthy can only lose four votes, and there are 18 Republicans who represent House districts that Biden carried in 2020.
That small margin for error is what the Congressional Integrity Project, a 501(c)4 political group formed to defend Biden from GOP investigations, is hoping to exploit. The group announced Monday that it’s launching a digital ad campaign calling out the 18 Republicans in their districts for failing to stand up to “bogus impeachment stunts.”
“Every Republican who fails to denounce these political stunts is complicit in using taxpayers’ money on behalf of Donald Trump,” said Kyle Herrig, the group’s executive director.
It’s hard to predict how impeachment would play out politically. Compared to the multiyear saga over Trump’s dealings with Russia and Ukraine, the GOP investigations into Biden have generated limited headlines. High-quality public polling on the question of impeachment is almost nonexistent.
Republicans predicted Democrats would suffer a backlash in 2020 after impeaching Trump in 2019. While Democrats did underperform at the House level, the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated economic downturn meant impeachment ultimately played little role in the day-to-day political fights leading up to the election.
Senate Republicans are wary of the idea of impeaching Biden, a risky move that could spoil their chance to capitalize on a once-in-a-generation map and take back control of the upper chamber next year. Although the decision whether to impeach a president ultimately rests with the House, top Republican senators have suggested proceeding with caution.
“Impeachment ought to be rare rather than common,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said at a weekly press conference last month. “And so I’m not surprised that having been treated the way they were, House Republicans... begin to open up the possibility of doing it again. And I think this is not good for the country, to have repeated impeachment problems.”
“We gotta do the hard work. They cheapened the process the last two [impeachments]. We don’t want to repeat that mistake,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), referring to the two Democratic-led impeachments of Trump.
McCarthy suggested Monday on Fox News that the Biden administration’s stonewalling was actually forcing Republicans to move toward impeachment.
“The actions of the Biden administration withholding information,” McCarthy said, “will rise to the level where we need [an] impeachment inquiry, to get the strength of the Congress to get the information that we need to give to the American public and follow through on our constitutional authority.”
The White House pointed out on Tuesday, however, that the Treasury Department has complied by giving Republicans access to “suspicious activity reports” that banks used to flag transactions connected to Hunter Biden. And in response to a subpoena, the Justice Department let the House oversight committee look at a raw FBI file containing an unverified bribe allegation from a Ukrainian oligarch.
“Speaker McCarthy has decided the truth should not get in the way of his and House Republicans’ relentless efforts to smear the President,” White House spokesperson Ian Sams said in an email. “They are prioritizing their own extreme, far-right political agenda at the expense of focusing on what really matters to the American people: working together to make their lives better.”
Pelosi may have summed up how Democrats feel about impeachment during a Friday appearance on MSNBC, calling it a “diversionary tactic” and predicting it would backfire on the GOP.
“If they want to subject their members who are in difficult districts, subject them to that, bring it on,” she said. “Just bring it on.”
