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Wednesday afternoon brought the first major battle over the House Republican effort to advance an impeachment inquiry targeting President Biden. There have been other skirmishes certainly, including the September hearing that was at the time presumed to be the first of several in the inquiry that had already been announced. But Wednesday’s consideration of a resolution formalizing an inquiry, calling a mulligan on the one begun more than two months ago and starting the clock over, was the debate on the House floor over the idea — allowing lawmakers from both parties to make their cases on the subject.
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Republicans pointed to the dusty flea market of allegations and insinuations they’ve accrued over the past 11 months, repeating their long-standing insistence that Biden had obviously done something wrong, that they proved it and that they just needed a bit more authority to prove that he had done something wrong.
Democrats focused heavily on Donald Trump.
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That approach was striking. Democratic legislators spoke and most, if not all, invoked the idea that the Republican interest in investigating Biden was simply a function of their manifesting Trump’s will.
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“We are here for one reason and one reason alone,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) began. “Donald Trump demanded that Republicans impeach, so they are going to impeach. These guys, these Republicans, they don’t work for you, the American people. They work for Donald Trump.” Republicans, he said, were simply “upset Trump lost.”
“The evidence simply does not support these baseless charges,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). “So why is the MAGA wing of the Republican Party resorting to this political stunt? Two words: Donald Trump.”
“I rise to oppose this perverse, illegitimate effort to do Donald Trump’s political dirty work,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.). A bit later, Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-Mass.) echoed the theme: “This has never been about truth. This is about avenging Donald Trump.”
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In his comments, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) offered a more pointed analogy. He noted that Trump had been impeached in 2019 for having attempted to extort the president of Ukraine into announcing a probe of Joe Biden before the 2020 election.
“In 2023,” Schiff said, “Donald Trump is once again seeking help in his campaign, this time by badgering Republicans to impeach Joe Biden.”
It’s an approach that is unquestionably rooted in the advice of some consultant somewhere, perhaps clutching a sheaf of poll results. It also seems as though it cedes ground to Republicans.
Consider why Trump wanted that investigation into Biden from Ukraine. He wanted to impugn his opponent, sure, but specifically on a question of ethics, where Biden had an obvious advantage. He wanted, as he so often does, to muddy the differences between himself and his opponent, to leave voters at least wondering if there was a distinction to be drawn even if they didn’t view Biden as less ethical. That all sides were bad, that this is just Washington as usual. Schiff’s point was that the House impeachment push has a similar aim: draw an equivalence between Trump’s impeachment and what’s happening to Biden.
The retribution impeachment
By repeatedly invoking Trump as the trigger for the impeachment push, Democrats are presumably hoping to elicit a deeply ingrained disgust from their base, an assumption that the whole thing is just more Trumpian nonsense. And, as the consultants can probably show, it likely will work. But it also suggests that this is just more of the same, business as usual, another Trump-vs.-Democrats fight. It obscures the specific and unique ways in which the Republican effort is flawed.
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Republican speakers worked valiantly to suggest that the finalization of the inquiry rested on a robust foundation, if not an expanding one.
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“What we are seeing from the other side today is that they want to talk about Donald Trump,” said Rep. Russell Fry (R-S.C.). “They want to talk about Jan. 6. They want to talk about a perceived lack of transparency. They want to talk about how nothing is happening out in the open. Well, let me assure you that we have done more in 10 months than law enforcement agencies have done in five years.”
That’s true, in the sense that Republicans have made more allegations and elevated more unfounded claims than has law enforcement. Of course, that’s a bit like saying that pundits who oppose vaccinations have done more to elevate questions about the safety of inoculations than have scientists and researchers.
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Fry offered examples of what they had found, claiming that there had been a “$40,000 direct payment to Joe Biden himself” and a “$200,000 direct payment to Joe Biden himself” — adding that this was “allegedly under a loan.” There’s no real question that these were loan repayments, suggested in part by the memo line on these years-old checks reading “loan repayment.” But this is how it has worked for some time: Republicans come up with a way to present something clearly innocuous as nefarious — and then pretend that the burden of proof is on those insisting that those things are innocuous.
“The Democrats would have us simply turn a blind eye to mounting evidence of a family influence-peddling scheme that implicates the president,” Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) said in his remarks. “This we cannot do.”
The evidence is “mounting” only in the sense that Republican leaders like House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) will sporadically present some new thing to cast as nefarious. But the broad strokes of what Republicans insist they are investigating remain unchanged since then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) first announced an impeachment inquiry at the end of September. It’s the same claims, no more robust than they were then. Republicans have spent 11 months trying to dig up dirt and in recent weeks have had to resort to turning over their old piles.
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The argument — the perpetual argument, stretching to at least August — is that the lawmakers simply need more power to dig further to uncover the evidence that they are sure exists. That was the theory behind McCarthy’s announcement in September: Now they could issue subpoenas! That’s the theory behind the formal vote on impeachment: Now they can … issue subpoenas! (Efforts to hold the president’s son Hunter Biden in contempt for not appearing for a deposition Wednesday morning may be weakened, as journalist Marcy Wheeler notes, by his November subpoena having cited an impeachment probe that will be approved in December.)
Republicans, including on Wednesday, attempted to present their inquiry as more serious and sober than the Democratic push in 2019. It is not; that probe was rooted in a whistleblower report citing specific actions by Trump and by independent reporting. Soon after it was announced that September, there were depositions that reinforced what Trump was alleged to have done and then hearings to present that evidence publicly. By mid-December 2019, Democrats were drafting articles of impeachment.
The Republican approach isn’t slower because it’s more serious. It’s slower because it’s less serious.
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That would seem like a better argument for Democrats to make, that this is a unique effort to attack Biden using particularly weak argumentation. There was some of that Wednesday, yes, but in the expected frame of “this is Trump’s fault.”
In theory, time would tell which side’s gambit is more successful. But we know how this will almost certainly go. Republicans will bring forward articles of impeachment and Republican voters will cheer. Democratic voters will boo. At least one will probably pass, with Republicans from Biden-voting districts rejecting some other article of impeachment so they have political cover. It will go to the Senate and Biden will be acquitted.
Trump will get to say, see, this is what they do to presidents. And, if Wednesday is a guide, Democrats will have squandered the opportunity to articulate why this time was different.
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