For Republican members of the 118th Congress, it’s a good thing they can’t be expelled for legislative malpractice. If so, they’d all be out of a job. And rightfully so.
Last week’s vote to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden is one of the most irresponsible actions taken in the history of Congress. It is breathtakingly baseless, cynical and malicious.
As written, the impeachment clause has always been problematic. Although the Founding Fathers gave Congress the power to impeach a president, they never spelled out exactly what he could be impeached for, other than the vaguely-defined “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Then-Rep. Gerald Ford (R-Mich.) famously remarked that “an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
But nobody ever thought Congress would impeach a president for no reason at all — until now. And it’s important to understand why House Republicans are doing so. Not because they have any proof that Biden has committed “high crime or misdemeanors” as president. In fact, everything they accuse him of — again, without evidence — occurred when he was vice president.
Republicans are on the impeachment warpath against Biden for only two reasons, both driven by Donald Trump. The first reason is pure revenge. Their first rationale for impeachment goes no deeper than this: Democrats impeached Donald Trump twice (for good reason), so now that they’re in power they’re going to impeach Joe Biden, whether he did anything wrong on not — just to make Donald Trump happy and give Democrats a taste of their own medicine.
The second reason is to create a diversion. With Trump facing 91 felony charges in four courts, his legal battles are bound to dominate political news coverage in 2024 — unless Republicans can successfully put up a smoke screen. Their second rationale for impeachment is just as shallow. Look, they can now cry, Donald Trump’s not the only one charged with wrongdoing. So is Joe Biden. It goes with the job.
Of course, the only problem is that after spending a whole year bloviating, Republicans still don’t have a case. Yes, Biden’s son, Hunter, traded on his father’s name and made millions doing so, but despite several “blockbuster” hearings, neither Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) nor Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) have produced one shred of evidence that even one dollar made it into Joe Biden’s pocket.
As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump has conclusively shown, while Comer and Jordan say they “think” and “fear” that Biden’s somehow linked to his son’s seedy business dealings, they’ve produced no evidence to date, only “a link and a universe they’re still struggling to manifest.”
Surely, it’s not too much to expect Congress to find evidence of wrongdoing before launching an impeachment inquiry, and not begin an inquiry in the hope of finding some evidence. Yet that’s what every Republican member of Congress voted to do.
If only they’d heeded the advice a member of their conference issued back in 2019: “The Founding Fathers, the founders of this county, warned us against single-party impeachment. You know why? Because they feared it would bitterly and perhaps irreparably divide our nation…If you don’t like the president, he goes on the ballot again after four years. We have an election again in eleven months. Let the people decide this.”
That was Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), four years before he became Speaker and, like Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) before him, surrendered to the demands of the Freedom Caucus.
Press hosts “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”