Maybe “high crimes and misdemeanors” should include impeaching a president without evidence.
On Wednesday, every Republican in the U.S. House voted — based on no facts — to authorize a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
The vote follows months of digging into Biden’s record and coming up empty. First, three House committees investigated Biden and his son Hunter. In September, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy directed the House to open an impeachment inquiry, but there was no official vote. On Wednesday, an official vote passed on party lines.
But with all that investigating, Republicans lack evidence to justify an impeachment. Instead of a smoking gun, they have a pea shooter — with no peas. Several Republican lawmakers have admitted as much, saying the impeachment process is needed to generate evidence to justify an impeachment process.
Got that?
What Republicans are up to is more perilous than the usual political gamesmanship. The precedent they are setting threatens to turn the concept of impeachment into a partisan tool to be trotted out whenever the House and president are from opposing parties. Every president in that circumstance will come into office facing the prospect of an impeachment vote as soon as the newly inaugurated president does something the opposition doesn’t like.
That’s not the kind of responsible civics taught in textbooks. Good government — you know, the sort of thing that actually helps people — will suffer.
Republicans have a number of motivations. Former President Donald Trump wants a Biden impeachment to ease the sting of his own two impeachments. A stream of impeachment headlines may undercut Biden’s support in an election year and counterbalance news arising from Trump’s criminal proceedings. Far-right Trump supporters in the House and elsewhere will be placated.
But political advantage is not a justification for impeachment.
Congressional investigators have rifled through nearly 40,000 pages of records and pored over dozens of hours of witness testimony without finding proof of Biden profiting from his son’s business dealings or engaging in any quid pro quo.
With a Democratic Senate majority, it’s unlikely Biden’s opponents will find the votes for a conviction that would remove Biden from office.
But if the process gets to the Senate after a vote to impeach in the House, the damage will have been done. Another strut that shores up a functioning future Congress and presidency will have been kicked away.
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