House Republican leaders are planning a vote to formalize their impeachment inquiry into President Biden next week.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Tuesday that the plan is for the House to vote to authorize the inquiry next week, the last scheduled week in session before lawmakers leave for a holiday recess. Other GOP sources familiar with the plans told The Hill the same.
“The House has no choice if it’s going to follow its constitutional responsibility to formally adopt an impeachment inquiry on the floor so that when the subpoenas are challenged in court, it will be at the apex of our constitutional authority,” Johnson said in a Tuesday press conference.
“This vote is not a vote to impeach President Biden. This is a vote to continue the inquiry of impeachment, and that’s a necessary constitutional step,” Johnson said.
The move to a formal vote comes months after former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) declared a swath of House GOP investigations to be an impeachment inquiry in September — a reverse of the stance he took during the first Trump-era impeachment when he said it needed to be kicked off with a formal vote.
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The White House has argued an impeachment inquiry without a vote is unconstitutional. Republicans have countered that stance even as they hope a formal vote will compel more testimony. The GOP and the White House have disagreed about the extent of the Biden administration’s compliance with requests.
“Constitutionally, it’s not required. Speaker said we’re an impeachment inquiry, we’re in an impeachment inquiry,” House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), one of the leaders of the probe, told reporters Monday. “But if you have a vote of the full House of Representatives and the majority say we’re in that official status as part of our overall oversight work or constitutional oversight duty that we have, it just helps us in court.”
The impeachment inquiry is multi-pronged, probing the foreign business activities of Biden’s son Hunter Biden and other family members; disputed and shaky allegations that Biden as vice president used policy pressure to benefit Ukrainian energy company Burisma; and whether the Department of Justice improperly slow-walked a tax crimes investigation into Hunter Biden.
Republicans have held a series of informational sessions behind closed doors, pitching members on the need to shore up the legal standing of the GOP investigations by securing the backing of the House.
The move comes as the inquiry proceeds into a more difficult phase, where GOP leaders are bracing for potential court battles to secure additional records and testimony.
Still, despite complaints from the GOP, they’ve amassed a trove of documents related to their probe, including Hunter Biden’s and James Biden’s personal bank records, as well as the financials behind their business ventures.
The White House has consistently pushed back against Republican claims they have failed to turn over evidence sought by the trio of panels.
“Claims of ‘obstruction’ and ‘stonewalling’ are easily refuted by the facts,” the White House wrote in its memo, highlighting more than 35,000 pages of private financial records and more than 2,000 pages of Treasury Department financial reports.
Their 36 hours of testimony also include interviews with special counsel David Weiss, who is overseeing the Hunter Biden prosecution, three FBI agents, two U.S. attorneys, the head of the Department of Justice Tax Division, two IRS supervisory officials, and the general counsel at the National Archives.
Mychael Schnell contributed.