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WASHINGTON — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy faces unease within his ranks about impeaching President Joe Biden, with some politically vulnerable and centrist Republicans indicating they don’t believe there is enough evidence to take such a drastic step.
Those Republicans are also conflicted about whether to launch a formal inquiry, typically the first step before impeachment proceedings, and their anxieties highlight the practical and political dilemmas that McCarthy, R-Calif., and GOP leaders will have to navigate.
Right-wing hard-liners say they’re ready to impeach Biden and have been pressuring McCarthy to do so for months. The Constitution allows Congress to impeach a president for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and far-right Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., have already introduced articles of impeachment focused on Biden’s handling of the border. McCarthy’s justification for considering an inquiry — which he hasn’t made official, but which has gained more traction within the party — focuses on the president’s son Hunter Biden and his work with foreign companies.
Biden and the White House say the president did nothing wrong, and they attribute the burgeoning impeachment effort to pure partisan politics. In an email Tuesday, White House spokesman Ian Sams accused McCarthy of caving in to the far right with a “baseless, evidence-free impeachment stunt.”
If he proceeds, McCarthy would need nearly all Republicans to back impeachment under his thin majority. He has expressed interest in launching a formal investigation to explore unproven claims about Hunter Biden’s business dealings — an inquiry some Republicans say could unearth evidence. But McCarthy can lose no more than four GOP votes before the effort collapses — he’s unlikely to win over any Democrats.
The make-or-break votes will come from 18 politically vulnerable Republicans who represent districts Biden won in 2020 and other self-styled GOP pragmatists. And that may be difficult.
“Impeachment should not be political by any stretch. We’ve seen what happens when Congress acts in a political matter — it does not serve the interests of the American people in any way,” freshman Rep. Mike Lawler, D-N.Y., who defeated the Democrats’ campaign chair in a high-profile race last fall, told reporters.
“So the question to me right now is do the investigations — are they producing enough facts and evidence that warrant taking it to the next step?” Lawler said. “I don’t think it’s there at the moment, but these committees are doing their job.”
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, another Biden-district Republican, also said he doesn’t want to rush into impeachment.
“We’ve got to get back to a point where impeachment is what it was intended to be. I feel like, you know, both in the last cycle and in this cycle, we’re converting into essentially a vote of no confidence in the British Parliament. And I don’t want to see our country go down that path,” Fitzpatrick, the co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, said in an interview.
‘Serious questions of impropriety’
Some vulnerable Republicans say they’re open to an inquiry. But so far, they broadly agree that the committees investigating the Biden family haven’t produced proof that would warrant impeachment.
Rep. Marc Molinaro, R-N.Y., who narrowly won a district that voted for Biden, said that he sees “serious questions of impropriety” and that the House’s “proper role” is to “provide oversight.”
“If the administration doesn’t want to be transparent or answer questions, you have to continue that process,” he said, adding that by having worked in New York politics, “I can smell corruption when I smell it.”
Asked what his bar would be for voting to impeach Biden, Molinaro said: “It’s an open question. I think at this point the committees are proceeding, and the administration would be wise to respond to those questions.”
Rep. Mike Garcia of California, another Biden-district Republican, said impeachment should proceed “through the auspices of due process” and expressed openness to it, depending on the evidence.
“We’ll see where the articles go. We’ll see where the evidence points,” Garcia said.
“What you can’t do is turn a blind eye — if there’s evidence and witness testimony that someone has committed a crime … if it’s a president who’s taking a bribe from a foreign country and then funneling it through family members and then lying about it, that’s a problem,” he said. “The bottom line is that if there’s a foundational substantiation for impeachment, then we don’t have a choice. We have to proceed forward.”
‘You can’t impeach the president’s son’
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer’s investigation has largely focused on Hunter Biden and his business associates, who made millions of dollars from foreign entities while Joe Biden was vice president. But earning money from foreign entities isn’t a crime, in and of itself, and so far, Comer hasn’t made a criminal recommendation based on the trove of banking records the committee obtained.
And while Comer, R-Ky., has repeatedly attacked the Bidens as a “crime family,” he has yet to produce any evidence linking the president to his son’s business dealings.
“You can’t impeach the president’s son,” said Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who has warned that impeaching Biden could put the GOP majority at risk.
In fact, a key figure whom Republicans have pointed to as evidence that the president should be removed from office is Hunter Biden’s business associate Devon Archer, who testified last week to the Oversight Committee that he had no knowledge of any wrongdoing by Joe Biden or that Biden had changed foreign policy to benefit his son. Archer did, however, portray Hunter Biden as a man who was selling the Biden family “brand” to make money for himself.
Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said Hunter Biden’s problems don’t “show anything about President Biden.”
“Through all the slander that the Republicans have hurled about President Biden, there’s no evidence whatsoever that he’s involved in any of this. It’s unfortunate — and I’m sure he’s very unhappy that he’s got such a troubled son with the drug addiction and criminal prosecutions,” Nadler said. “But any talk of impeaching or any other action against President Biden is really absurd … and, second of all, really designed to take people’s attention away from the real indictments of former President Trump.”
‘Rumor and innuendo’
Like most politically vulnerable Republicans, Rep. George Santos of New York, the scandal-plagued freshman who represents one of the Biden-won districts, has been deferential to McCarthy and suggested he would do the same if he were asked to vote on impeachment.
“If the speaker has enough material, sure,” he said.
Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who led the 1990s impeachment of President Bill Clinton, said his advice to McCarthy now is: “Open the inquiry, but go very slow.”
Gingrich, whose impeachment of Clinton backfired with a public that perceived the GOP as overreaching, now warns House Republicans to proceed with caution.
“We should open the inquiry, because it allows them to ask a broader range of questions,” Gingrich told NBC News. “But we should move very, very, very slowly beyond that.”
Rep. Dave Joyce, R-Ohio, the chair of the moderate Republican Governance Group, said that as a county prosecutor he relied on “facts” — and that the facts right now don’t warrant impeachment.
“You hear a lot of rumor and innuendo … but that’s not fact to me. As a former prosecutor, I think there has to be facts, and I think there has to be due process that we follow, and I’ve not seen any of that today,” Joyce said.
“Some of the stuff obviously deserves further review,” he said, “but there is nothing hard in front of us at this moment to say that any of that is true.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
