Republicans bash Boebert for forcing Biden impeachment vote: ‘Frivolous’

House Republicans teed off Wednesday on one of their own colleagues, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), over her stunning move to force a vote this week to impeach President Biden.

While no fans of the president, Boebert’s GOP critics said her move to stage an impeachment vote this week is wildly premature, harming the Republicans’ ongoing efforts to investigate the Biden family’s business dealings while undermining potential impeachment efforts in the future.

At a closed-door meeting of the GOP conference on Capitol Hill, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) took the remarkable step of urging his troops to oppose the impeachment resolution when it hits the floor later in the week, a House Republican told The Hill.

“I don’t think it’s the right thing to do,” McCarthy later told reporters.

“This is one of the most serious things you can do as a member of Congress. I think you’ve got to go through the process. You’ve got to have the investigation,” McCarthy said. “And throwing something on the floor actually harms the investigation that we’re doing right now.”

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McCarthy told reporters that he called Boebert on Tuesday and asked her to talk to the closed-door House GOP conference meeting about her impeachment resolution before moving to force a vote. McCarthy said Boebert told him she would think about it, but then went ahead and made the privileged motion Tuesday anyway.

The Colorado Republican also did not attend Wednesday’s meeting.

Boebert instead appeared on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s show Wednesday morning, defending her move to force a vote on impeachment despite leadership encouraging her not to.

“I would love for committees to do the work, but I haven’t seen the work be done on this particular subject,” Boebert said. She later said that there are not enough GOP votes to pass impeachment articles out of committee.

“This, I’m hoping, generates enthusiasm with the base to contact their members of Congress and say, ‘We want something done while you have the majority,’” Boebert said.

McCarthy told Republicans that he opposed the two impeachments of former President Trump because Democrats were acting on emotion, not facts, according to a source familiar with the Speaker’s remarks.

Boebert made the surprise privileged motion Tuesday evening to bring up her resolution to impeach Biden over his handling of the U.S.-Mexico border, forcing a floor vote on the measure some time this week. Democrats plan to make a motion to table the resolution, blocking a vote on impeachment itself. The table resolution is expected to succeed. 

On Bannon’s show, she urged Republicans to not vote to table her impeachment resolution.

“We have the majority. This does not have to be tabled,” Boebert said. “If we have Republicans stick together, we can have that debate about the sovereignty of our nation and how important it is to shut the southern border down and secure it.”

Boebert’s impeachment push comes as Republicans have tried to turn their attention to other Biden-focused criticism this week. After the president’s son, Hunter Biden, agreed to a plea deal involving federal tax and gun charges Tuesday, Republicans dug in on their investigation into the business dealings of Biden’s family members.

It also follows Boebert’s ideological ally, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), forcing a vote on censuring Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) over his handling of investigations into Trump and the first Trump impeachment. The House will vote Tuesday on a modified version of the resolution after 20 House Republicans helped to tank the Schiff censure resolution last week.

McCarthy argued that the Schiff censure was a reason to not rush impeachment articles.

“We’re going to censure Schiff for actually doing the exact same thing — lying to the American public and taking us through impeachment,” McCarthy said. “We’re going to turn around the next day and do try to do the same thing that Schiff did? I just don’t think that’s honest.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) speaks during a press conference held by the House Freedom Caucus regarding the proposed Biden-McCarthy debt limit deal on Tuesday, May 30, 2023.

More privileged resolutions could be coming. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said that she will convert all her impeachment articles against Biden and top figures in his administration into privileged resolutions to use “when I feel it’s necessary.”

Republicans have spent years hammering Democrats for what they said were a pair of thinly argued impeachments of Trump, and many are now warning that Boebert’s impeachment effort — which sidesteps all committee action — follows in the same flawed mold.

“This shouldn’t be playground games, in my view. This should be serious,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) groused Wednesday. “If there’s real facts for impeachment then you go there. But doing this is wrong, and I think the majority of the conference feels that way.”

Bacon said there are “viable areas” of Biden’s background that merit investigation, but he suggested there’s no proof of wrongdoing — at least not yet — to warrant impeachment.

“Impeachment shouldn’t be something that is frivolous,” he said. “We should get to the facts of that, but just doing a privileged motion is wrong,” he said. “It’s a person thinking about themselves instead of the team.”  

Rep. Don Bacon is among the Republicans bashing Rep. Lauren Boebert over forcing a vote to impeach President Biden. (Greg Nash)

Others quickly piled on.  

“I think that things like impeachment are one of the most awesome powers of the Congress, it’s not something you should flippantly exercise in two days. And I think that it actually undermines efforts to hold people accountable in the future,” Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), a close McCarthy ally, told reporters.

He said the “right way” to go about the matter is through regular order, “empowering the committee chairs and members.”

“It’s important for the Republican conference to act together in unison to counter the bad policies of the Biden administration,” Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.) said. “And therefore, if members want to suggest or bring up the idea of a privileged motion, they ought to come to the conference to discuss that in advance and have a collective discussion of it before they take the decision to do it.”

Greene said some members of the conference were mad at Boebert because her privileged motion “came out of nowhere.” And some of the criticism was personal. Greene, who has had public dust-ups with Boebert in the past, accused Boebert of copying her own impeachment push.

“I had already introduced articles of impeachment on Joe Biden for the border, asked her to co-sponsor mine, she didn’t. She basically copied my articles and then introduced them and then changed them to a privileged resolution,” Greene said. “So of course I support ‘em because they’re identical to mine.”

“They’re basically a copycat,” she added.

Not all Republicans were criticizing Boebert on Wednesday. Some conservatives defended her strategy, even as it would circumvent the conventional committee process they had demanded of GOP leaders this year. 

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) — the chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus who was one of several Republicans who pushed for regular order during the drawn-out Speaker’s race in January — argued that lawmakers were not trying to circumvent the process by bringing up privileged resolutions.

“Regular order also includes individual members being able to represent their districts,” Perry said. “[It] might not be what I do, but if that’s what they see as necessary then that’s their prerogative.”

Updated at 12:59 p.m.