House Republicans are getting real about impeaching President Joe Biden. Maybe.
Holding a narrow House majority, Republicans through much of 2023 pursued a series of investigations about the president and his wayward son, Hunter Biden, whose past business ventures tried to profit from the family name of the former vice president and before that the Delaware Democrat’s 36-year Senate career. Now in an election year, House Republicans, led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), have a big decision to make on whether to force a floor vote on the president’s impeachment, which would set up a Senate trial.
BIDEN’S EIGHT MOST NOTABLE GAFFES OF 2023
It’s the fate that befell former President Donald Trump twice in 14 months when Democrats ran the House. And it’s undoubtedly popular with the Republican base, as a revenge move. A Biden impeachment could also spur Democrats on the fence about voting for Joe Biden, who will turn 82 shortly after Election Day 2024 and is asked frequently about his age and cognitive and physical abilities. Independent voters, a key group in a narrowly divided nation, also may not take kindly to the impeachment of Joe Biden, at least with the evidence presented so far by House Republicans, which seems murky at best.
Longtime GOP Impeachment Plans
Efforts to impeach Joe Biden aren’t new. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has already filed a raft of resolutions demanding investigations into the president, the first one coming on Jan. 21, 2021, his first full day in office.
Last year, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) cleared the way for the House to open an impeachment inquiry, skipping a floor vote. It’s a process House Republicans, then in the minority, dragged then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Democrats over in the fall 2019 and early 2021 efforts to remove Trump. Both, on the president allegedly withholding U.S. military aid to Ukraine and Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, both ended in Senate acquittal, in rules requiring a two-thirds majority to remove the sitting chief executive.
Voting to open an inquiry is not the same as supporting impeaching the president — as the 17 Republican House members representing districts Joe Biden won in 2020 are happy to remind their constituents. But the fact-finding missions, the third in five calendar years, will almost surely result in a move that becomes less historic.
With an inquiry open and years of evidence collected from various investigations, Johnson could authorize an impeachment vote as early as February — once the thorny issues of approving several spending bills and averting a government shutdown are (hopefully) completed in January.
Republicans were likely always going to impeach whoever the next Democrat in the White House. Their rage that Trump faced two Senate trials, one of which occurred after he had left the Oval Office, is matched in outrage at what they call indefensible behavior by Hunter Biden and, by extension, the president.
However, Republicans run the risk of achieving precisely the opposite goal of politically tarring, feathering, and trying to remove the president. If Joe Biden could have asked Republicans for one gift in the just-passed holiday season, it would have been an excuse to avoid discussing his historically bad polling. An impeachment inquiry and likely trial in the Senate that has next to no hope of resulting in a conviction and removal gives the president a chance to take a page out of Trump’s book and turn a “weaponized” investigation into a stump speech staple.
Inquiries, Impeachments, Indictments
The first Trump impeachment coincided with a jolt to the then-president’s approval rating. On Dec. 1, 2019, Trump’s approval rating was sitting at 43.4%, far from his lowest point, but he didn’t dip that low again until June 2020 during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to RealClearPolitics. By Dec. 18, when the House voted to impeach him, Trump’s approval rating had climbed to 44.5% and continued to go up. It reached a high of 47.3% on April 1, 2020, before the pandemic pains hollowed out his support.
And the narrative of Trump vs. political enemies carrying out a vendetta against him has continued with every political and legal bump in the road. It’s hard to gauge what effect the second impeachment had on Trump’s approval rating, which was close to bottoming out after the disastrous Jan. 6 riot, but a trail of indictments in state and federal courts has only bolstered the GOP front-runner’s lead in the 2024 presidential primary.
Joe Biden and Trump have very different skill sets as politicians. Juxtaposed with Trump’s brash New York attitude and reputation as a ruthless businessman with a nose for deals and a willingness to stick a knife in a friend or foe to gain an advantage, Joe Biden has positioned himself as a kindly grandfather figure willing to meet his political rivals halfway. The president boasts that his half-century in Washington, D.C., means no one understands the district better than him.
Joe Biden continues to distance himself from his son’s actions, with the White House shifting its messaging to clarify the president wasn’t involved in any of Hunter Biden’s business deals, as opposed to not having any knowledge of them.
But with Republicans piling up evidence of suspicious dealing by the president’s son, the White House continues to hammer home the fact that there are only tenuous strings linking the two Bidens — and that a new inquiry, carrying on an old line of accusations, isn’t going to change anything.
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“House Republicans have already admitted that they are doing [this] to help Donald Trump despite the fact that many members of their own party have conceded there is no evidence to support impeaching President Biden,” White House spokesman for oversight and investigations Ian Sams said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “We’ll continue to call them out for prioritizing this baseless political stunt at the expense of meaningful work to actually address the issues the American people care about, like lowering costs, creating jobs, and strengthening our healthcare.”
Throughout December, the White House kept up a stream of criticism of the impeachment effort, rounding up dozens of GOP lawmakers and operatives who have expressed doubt about the inquiry. And that strategy isn’t likely to change anytime soon.
