House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a realist when it comes to impeachment. “Impeachment inquiry is not impeachment,” McCarthy told reporters. “Impeachment inquiry is allowing Congress to get the information.”
McCarthy has no illusions about removing Joe Biden from office. Getting 17 Democratic senators to vote to convict Biden of “high crimes and misdemeanors” while convincing all 49 Republican senators to vote the same is not possible unless some kind of smoking gun was found.
But that doesn’t mean that the House can’t start hearings on impeachment. What’s needed most by Republicans is some kind of crime. Bribery would appear to be the best bet, although obstruction would be plausible too.
The problem, of course, is that “plausible” doesn’t cut it. Republicans require solid proof that could stand up in a court of law. I know that didn’t stop the Democrats in their first impeachment hearing, but the rule of law has to matter somewhere.
The first legal hurdle is to determine if President Biden can be impeached for crimes committed while he was vice president.
“The crucial impeachment language in the Constitution is not limited to ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ committed while ‘in office,’” senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation Hans A. von Spakovsky told Fox News Digital. “That language is not there.”
“When you ask lawyers these questions, what they tend to try to suggest is this is controlled by legal rules and, therefore, they propose that the abuse of power that rises to the level of ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ has to occur when the person is president — it has to be an abuse of presidential power,” McCarthy said. “The fact of the matter, though, is that impeachment is not controlled by legal rules but political rules.”
Quoting then-House Minority Leader Gerald Ford in 1970, McCarthy said, “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
“The Constitution specifically assigns to Congress the determination of whether impeachable offenses were found, and, under separation of powers, the court stays out of it,” McCarthy continued. “Politically speaking, it is whatever Congress says it is.”
Because it’s a political matter and not necessarily legal, the people will have a say in whether Congress has gone too far in impeaching a president for something he did as vice president or not.
The president has fallen directly at the center of that investigation in recent weeks as an unclassified FBI document – an FD-1023 form – was released, containing allegations that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden “coerced” the CEO of Burisma Holdings to pay them millions of dollars in exchange for their help in getting the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the company fired.
That FD-1023 form is part of an ongoing federal investigation, law enforcement sources told Fox News Digital.
Since then, Republican leaders have suggested the possibility of an impeachment inquiry, saying the American people “have a right to know” if the criminal bribery scheme allegations are true and whether Biden was tangled up in his son’s business dealings.
McCarthy’s biggest problem is that there are some members of his caucus — and a few GOP senators — who might be a little gun-shy about impeachment because of the precedent it will set. Are we now to see each succeeding president hauled before the Senate to be tried on questionable charges?
McCarthy may be using the promise of an impeachment inquiry as a uniting expedient to bring his caucus together for the budget wars to be fought later this summer. The far-right especially needs to be able to deliver an impeachment inquiry to their constituents. To many of them, it’s the prospect of blowing up the Biden presidency that matters most.
Evidence that’s been gathered against Biden is currently thin. It would help if there was documentary evidence or recordings of phone calls — anything that would point the finger at Joe Biden and identify his crimes.
An inquiry is not likely to bring that out. But holding it will unite the GOP more than anything else.
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