House Republicans had been itching to start impeachment proceedings against Joe Biden from the moment he was inaugurated. But, as the idiom goes, be careful what you wish for: Six months after then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy initiated an inquiry into the president, the stunt is now blowing up in their faces. They’ve failed to turn up evidence to incriminate Biden, and the flimsy pretense they based their effort on appears to have come from Russian intelligence. Their already-slim majority is narrowing further with the early retirement of disillusioned Representative Ken Buck. And this week’s testimony from special counsel Robert Hur, who helped turbocharge questions about Biden’s age, likely failed to convince GOP members wary of impeachment to ultimately back the crusade.
“It is obviously time to move on, Mr. Speaker,” White House counsel Edward N. Siskel wrote to Mike Johnson Friday. “This impeachment is over. There is too much important work to be done for the American people to continue wasting time on this charade.”
Of course, “moving on” isn’t so simple for Republicans, politically-speaking. If they were to back down from their impeachment push, it would be something of an acknowledgement that they don’t have the goods on Biden—the man they hope to defeat in November. But by going through with it, without the necessary votes, they would be setting themselves up for a political humiliation far worse than they suffered when they failed to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the first try. “How would that make us look?” Texas Republican Troy Nehls said in a CNN interview.
“You save your gunpowder at some point,” South Carolina’s Ralph Norman added to Politico. “You saw the trouble we had on Mayorkas.”
Mayorkas, who was impeached on the second go-around last month, was targeted by House Republicans over the Biden administration’s immigration policy—days after they helped kill a bipartisan, White House-backed border bill that would have implemented the tougher measures they’d been demanding. That impeachment was also a political exercise. But the Biden impeachment crusade is even more brazenly political: a smoke-and-mirrors operation to hurt the president and avenge the twice-impeached Donald Trump.
James Comer and Jim Jordan—the carnival barkers of this political circus—have even begun to lower expectations, with the latter moving the timeline on a potential vote and the former suggesting that his fishing expedition will have succeeded whether or not Biden ends up impeached at the end of it. “My job was never to impeach,” the Oversight Committee chair told CNN.
That’s true, in a sense. Just as the GOP’s endless Benghazi investigation wasn’t about accountability but dragging down Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the Biden impeachment has been about creating the impression that he is, in Trump’s words, “crooked.” They don’t need a formal vote to accomplish that—just a platform to spread their innuendo about Biden’s supposed corruption. But how much reach do those hazy insinuations have beyond their right-wing bubble, especially as their leader faces concrete charges in four separate criminal cases? “None of the evidence has demonstrated that the president did anything wrong,” Siskel wrote to Johnson, who insists that his investigators have uncovered “alarming” proof of Biden’s wrongdoing but that he has been too “busy” to decide what to do with it. “In fact, it has shown the opposite of what House Republicans have claimed.”