Impeachment Could Have a Silver Lining for Joe Biden

Perhaps sensing a national nostalgia for impeachment proceedings, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has instructed fellow Republican House members to gather investigative kindling for an impeachment of President Joe Biden based on the unorthodox entrepreneurship of his son, Hunter Biden. “We will go wherever the evidence takes us,” McCarthy said.

One likely terminus of the McCarthy express would be nowhere, the same place the Republicans' 2012 investigation of Benghazi ended after costing $7 million but producing no evidence of wrongdoing by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or the executive branch. As the New York Times reports, McCarthy had to order the committees into starting the impeachment investigation because he didn’t have enough support to pass a full House vote, as was the case in the Trump and Clinton impeachments. But as Punchbowl News reported this week, there’s another. “It’s almost guaranteed that House Republicans will impeach Biden,” the outlet stated.

That being true, Biden needs to lift a few pages from the Donald Trump defense manual and exploit the charges for political gain instead of standing there like a punching bag.

It doesn’t matter that the charges against Biden — so far — lack any prosecutorial heft or that a nearly evenly split Senate will never vote to convict Biden unless the Republicans produce pictures of him bathing naked in a Scrooge McDuck-style vault of ill-gotten loot. There’s a presidential election coming up, and if you accept that the current agitation is mostly about political display, then Biden needs to stand his crashed bicycle up and start pedaling.

It’s no good for anybody’s political health to be investigated. It taints the subject with the presumption of something close to guilt — unless he fights back. No modern politician has cashed in on investigations better than Trump and just because Trump is the political enemy doesn’t mean Biden shouldn’t learn what he can from him.

Biden needn’t go full-Trump in contesting the charges, so there’s no reason for him to 1) lie; 2) defame everybody within shouting distance; and 3) threaten investigators and prosecutors with mayhem and bodily injury.

Assuming the vague charges against Biden are mostly illusory, Biden can climb out of his bunker and start converting the slop the Republicans are tossing into campaign advantage. (If, however, the charges amount to something, he’s out of luck.) Negative campaigning — which is what the Republican investigation amounts to at this point — directed against a candidate’s person as opposed to his policies have a way of backfiring. Instead of ignoring the Republicans, Biden should be able to shame and ridicule them and watch his poll numbers grow. One reason for Biden’s lackluster poll numbers must reside in the fact that so many voters have forgotten the old man is still president.

Standing up for himself would require something he has previously refused to do and should have done long ago — sever his political fate from the criminal justice fate of his son. Now that federal prosecutors seem prepared to indict Hunter Biden, the matter is out of his hands, and Biden would be a fool to continue to tip-toe around the issue with the presidency at stake. What would Donald Trump do if facing the same quandary? He would sell Don Jr. and Eric down the river at a discount.

Trump has become notorious for saying, “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way,” every time the wheels of justice turn against him. If Biden is ready to cut the Hunter umbilical cord, he could try out a line like, “They’re coming after Hunter to get to me.” (Which doesn’t seem far from the truth.) On the long shot that anybody outside of Washington remembers the hapless Benghazi hearings, Biden could also make a valid comparison to them as a previous example of a Republican Congress stirring up a bogus investigation for political gain.

By framing the impeachment machinery as a political ploy — which it is — Biden could do something Trump does in response to every charge, subpoena, hearing and investigation: Fundraise. Like clockwork, Trump blankets his base with fundraising pitches that reap McDuck-like riches. By reframing the impeachment as political martyrdom he could boost his flat approval ratings and boost his campaign treasury. Recasting Biden as a slashing action figure instead of an 80-year-old wax dummy couldn’t hurt his public image. As President Bill Clinton did during his impeachment unpleasantness, Biden could unleash a thousand surrogate defenders to jawbone the investigating Republicans. There’s no shortage of Democrats who would gladly carry the torch for him. This week’s jawboning by the White House to news organizations urging them to scrutinize the GOP’s impeachment festival is a mere spark when wholesale combustion is called for.

Go ahead and scream political persecution, Joe. Whether you like it or not, you’re in a fight. Perhaps the last one of your political career. Don’t disqualify yourself by napping.

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Send actionable evidence against Joe Biden to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. Doesn’t that sound better than X? I’ve renamed my Mastodon, Post, Bluesky, Notes, and Threads accounts as Wynken, Blyncken, Nod, Dopey, and Biden. My RSS feed is an eternal loop of negative campaigning.