The opening of an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden has started a fire in Congress' GOP as supporting members attempt to justify the probe alleging Biden's personal benefit from his son's business dealings, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., faces intensifying pressure from others in the right-wing base.
After McCarthy announced the full impeachment inquiry into the president Tuesday morning, House Republican Matt Gaetz, Fla., dismissed the move as a "baby step following weeks of pressure from House conservatives to do more" during a speech on the House floor, adding "We must move faster" and a promise to pursue McCarthy's ousting absent conservative reforms he's orioised.
"I rise today to serve notice: Mr. Speaker, you are out of compliance with the agreement that allowed you to assume this role. The path forward for the House of Representatives is to either bring you into immediate, total compliance or remove you pursuant to a motion to vacate the chair," Gaetz said during the speech.
"We're either going to get compliance, or we're going to start having votes on motions to vacate, and we're gonna have them regularly," he later told reporters. "I don't anticipate them passing immediately. But I think that, you know, if we have to begin every single day in Congress with the prayer, the pledge and the motion to vacate, so be it."
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The far-right Florida representative is urging McCarthy to adopt a tougher approach to a range of issues from the impeachment push against the president to balancing the budget and subpoenaing the president's son, Hunter Biden.
In a CNN appearance later Tuesday, Gaetz, though defending the inquiry, echoed his earlier sentiments about the Speaker and noted he regrets not being able to block the debt limit deal McCarthy agreed to with President Biden earlier this year that kept the country from defaulting on its debts. He argued that if McCarthy complied with a vote on term limits, the budget and individual spending bills, he could prevent a barrage of motions to vacate.
The Florida conservative also issued a warning to McCarthy after anchor Abby Phillip questioned him about previous efforts at using "leverage" against McCarthy to prompt action, threatening repeat votes to remove him from the speakership.
"I'm going to do it over and over again until it works, and today we saw a baby step towards that with more robust efforts towards impeachment, but I'm going to keep doing it...the American people want term limits, they want balanced budgets, they don't want to see government funding wrapped up in like just one up or down vote," Gaetz told Phillip.
Republicans opened what became a months-long investigation into the Biden family's business activities after gaining control of the House last fall. Given that the probe has failed to yield any evidence of President Biden's wrongdoing, McCarthy's order of an official impeachment inquiry Tuesday was also met with much rebuke from Democrats with White House spokesman Ian Sams even accusing the Speaker of "being told by Marjorie Taylor Greene to do impeachment."
Just two nights before McCarthy's announcement, Rep. Greene, R-Ga., shared information about the GOP impeachment effort against Biden with former President Donald Trump, who, according to an anonymous source close to him, has regularly talked by phone with members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus and other congressional Republicans to encourage the effort, The New York Times reports.
"I did brief him on the strategy that I want to see laid out with impeachment," Greene confirmed to the outlet.
She explained she told Trump that she wanted the impeachment inquiry to be "long and excruciatingly painful for Joe Biden," adding — though excluding Trump's response — that her ultimate goal was to have a "long list of names" of people whom she alleged were co-conspirators in the Biden family activities.
The former president has also spoken weekly over the past month to Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., a person familiar with the conversations told the Times. During those conversations, the third-ranking House Republican also briefed Trump on the impeachment inquiry strategy, the source added.
Another source familiar with Trump's thinking noted that despite encouraging an inquiry, he has not been pressing McCarthy personally but has instead been pushing several members to wipe his impeachment slate clean by potentially getting Congress to expunge them from the House record. He also has not voiced concern about the potential for the McCarthy impeachment effort to fall in Biden's favor, two sources with direct knowledge of his private statements over several months told the Times.
Greene told the outlet that she was confident that Trump would win re-election in 2024 and that she wishes "to go after every single one of them and use the Department of Justice to prosecute them."
While Biden's son is under investigation by a special counsel who is expected to bring down a gun charge against him soon with the potential for other tax charges, Republicans have not shown that the elder Biden has taken official actions while vice president to benefit from his son's financial activities or that he profited directly from his foreign business.
When questioned about what "actual evidence" Republicans had to merit the impeachment inquiry into President Biden and prove that it isn't just enacting "political revenge" for the impeachments of Trump just at a Tuesday press conference, Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., appeared to respond with irritation.
"Oh, I don't know," Perry said. " This is not about political revenge... You can see that the homes that the Bidens own can't be afforded on a congressional or Senate salary. You also understand that it's not normal for family members to receive millions of dollars from overseas interests. Those things aren't normal."
"If you can't see that, if you are that blind," the congressman concluded with a huff after listing off all the purported evidence, including a debunked claim about a Ukrainian prosecutor, the investigation claimed it found.
McCarthy also got into a heated exchange with CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju who questioned McCarthy's change in position regarding his starting the impeachment inquiry without a House vote after telling Breitbart earlier this month that he would call a vote before ordering the probe.
McCarthy responded by referencing former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., whom he criticized for beginning an impeachment inquiry of former President Trump in the same way in 2019. He claimed that Pelosi changed the precedent for future proceedings in the House when she announced the inquiry on Sept. 24 before the House voted on the matter on Oct. 31, 2019.
"It was withheld and good enough for every single Democrat here. It was good enough for the judge. Why would it have to be different today?" he said before detailing the allegations against Biden and reports about the Biden family.
Raju interjected, reminding McCarthy that he raised his question about the vote the Speaker had promised.
"But that's my question to you: Why don't you ask the other questions?" McCarthy responded before the two began to speak over each other.
When Raju told McCarthy he was curious why he changed his position, McCarthy replied, "I never changed my position."
"You told Breitbart 12 days ago you'd have a vote," Raju countered. McCarthy then dismissed the point, turning back to his podium to take another question.
Speaker McCarthy gets into back and forth with @mkraju over his flip-flop on starting impeachment inquiry without a House vote:
— The Recount (@therecount) September 13, 2023
Raju: “I’m curious why you changed your position.”
McCarthy: “I never changed my position.”
Raju: “You told Breitbart 12 days ago you’d have a vote.” pic.twitter.com/BCJjWNZ3sF
