House Republicans have been hungry to impeach Joe Biden since they took over the lower chamber earlier this year. But, with little appetite among party leaders for such an over-the-top move, they’ve had to mostly sate themselves with rambling congressional investigations and near-weekly acts of defiance—including against their own speaker.
Now, though, that speaker seems to be bellying up to the table himself: Not only does Kevin McCarthy appear to be committed to expunging Donald Trump’s two impeachments; he has openly suggested that the House probe into Biden’s family is “rising to the level of impeachment inquiry.” An impeachment investigation “provides Congress the strongest power to get the rest of the knowledge and information needed,” the House speaker told Sean Hannity Monday night, coming closer than ever to indicating he will support his right-wing members’ attempt to impeach Biden.
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This was always the direction things were headed: After all, 147 members of the House GOP, including McCarthy, backed an effort to prevent Biden from taking office in the first place over baseless claims of election fraud. And now, despite another dearth of evidence, many in that same group are grasping for any excuse to go after the president again. Whether it’s over Hunter Biden’s transgressions or perhaps over the border, the exact reason hardly seems to matter. Nor does the fact that any such effort will inevitably fail in the Democratically-controlled Senate; the point is just to get down on paper that Biden is somehow corrupt.
“Expunge the WRONGFUL Trump impeachments,” Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote Tuesday, referring to her legislation with number-three Republican Elise Stefanik, which would clear the former president’s record in Congress. “IMPEACH CRIMINAL Biden.”
The former has already been on McCarthy’s to-do list: As Politico reported last week, the House speaker made a secret promise to Trump to hold an expungement vote before August recess, as part of an effort to reaffirm his loyalty to the former president, which had been put in doubt when he dithered on endorsing him. But McCarthy had held off on backing the latter, instead seeking to de-escalate things—like last month, when he convinced far-right Representative Lauren Boebert to send her articles of impeachment to committee rather than force a floor vote on them. “We’re already having investigations,” he told reporters at the time. But on Monday, he ramped things up rather than cool them down, comparing Biden to Richard Nixon and accusing him of overseeing “the weaponization of government to benefit his family.”
“We have to get the answers to these questions,” he told Sean Hannity.
Ultimately, it’s not “answers” that McCarthy, Greene, Boebert, and the rest are actually after. What they’re trying to do, of course, is to create the impression that the twice-impeached, twice-indicted (so far) Trump is on equal moral footing with Biden—that there is, in Hannity’s words, a “malignant cancer” surrounding Biden’s presidency and that the “walls are closing” in on him. “This is not responsible,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday of McCarthy’s political games around impeachment. “This is about being afraid,” the California representative continued. “As I have said before, Donald Trump is the puppeteer. And what does he do all the time but shine the light on the strings?”