Impeach Biden? Yeah, Maybe
Terry H. Schwadron
July 28, 2023
So, Speaker Kevin McCarthy either is endorsing an impeachment investigation of President Joe Biden or he isn’t.
It depends on which day he answers a question that his own Republican caucus is asking — and disputing.
The latest clarification offered by the Speaker is that the various partial “investigations” that House committees have pursued are eliciting just enough information about allegations involving Hunter Biden as to suggest that the House formally investigate whether his dad, the president, somehow is involved in foreign bribery or influence peddling.
Um, what?
McCarthy told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that he believed the House GOP’s investigations into Hunter Biden’s business dealings were “rising to the level of [an] impeachment inquiry,” presumably into his father. Then he told reporters the next day he was not announcing a new step, but that the unverified information surfacing to date and what he sees as non-cooperation from different agencies “could” eventually merit an impeachment inquiry.
Meanwhile, even Senate Republicans, who note that the whole question of impeachment should be a rare happening, see opening a formal process against Biden as a risky political strategy and are hoping to stop the House effort. And there are House Republicans from congressional districts that Biden won in 2020 that want no part of impeachment talk or Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., who thinks impeachment is a “shiny object” to distract from pending federal spending disagreements.
Clearly, any impeachment effort would fail in a Democratic Senate, making the whole question moot.
Aiming at Hunter or Joe?
You may not be hanging on every twist and turn in the slow roasting that House Republicans have ordered for Hunter Biden as a stand-in for dad.
Republicans have aired various allegations both of foreign payments over years when Biden was vice president and complaints that Hunter has received preferential Justice Department treatment — a plea deal that ironically fell apart on Wednesday before the judge taking Hunter’s guilty pleas to two tax misdemeanors and a gun registration charge. The federal prosecutor, who has investigated Hunter for five years, left open the chance that he may bring more charges. Apparently, he’s not sure.
And, it is noteworthy, the plea agreement fell apart for procedural reasons, not because of Republican complaints that it was a sweetheart deal.
Meanwhile, little about wider charges has been verified and less has served to connect with the current president.
Nevertheless, with Donald Trump facing an increasing number of indictments for criminal behavior, the Hunter Biden folder of emails with or without context, an unverified FBI document with allegations of foreign payments, and the playing out of tax and gun registration charges against a hapless, addicted Hunter remains too juicy a target for Republicans to ignore.
Even as we are mere weeks away from another showdown over keeping the government afloat with a new budget, it is the impeachment issue and a constant readiness for investigating the Biden Crime Family that is keeping the Republican majority awake these days.
That financial showdown is the result of another McCarthy deal with Biden to resolve debt ceiling disagreements — but one that left McCarthy pleading with his own caucus to accept it.
As every political pundit makes obvious, it is McCarthy who seems most under pressure now. To keep his job as Speaker, he needs to satisfy the never-ending demands of his extreme right Freedom Caucus to find impeachable fault with Biden and to meet yet more direct pressure from Donald Trump to use the power of the House for Trump’s partisan political edge over Biden.
Already, we have seen multiple individual Republican efforts — most recently but separately from Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado — to start impeachment proceedings against Biden, either over immigration or a perception of unfair prosecutions or maybe because it is too hot. All have failed.
The impeachment talk is so loose that it is difficult to take seriously.
One would think there would be a need for more meat on the criminal bone — like maybe an actual crime — before invoking the constitutional impeachment power for “high crimes and misdemeanors” required for impeachment.
Of course, there is no constitutional requirement governing loose talk and politics.
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