Republicans ‘degrading impeachment as a tool’ in their efforts to target Biden

On Tuesday last two right-wing Republican politicians got into an argument on social media over who should get the credit for the new attempt to oust Joe Biden from the White House.

A couple of hours earlier, Republican speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy had directed that an impeachment inquiry be opened into the president.

Florida congressman Matt Gaetz told his followers on X, formerly Twitter, to remember he had pushed McCarthy for weeks to move against Biden.

Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene took issue with her colleague. “Correction my friend,” she wrote. “I introduced articles of impeachment against Joe Biden for his corrupt business dealings in Ukraine & China while he was vice-president on his very first day in office. You wouldn’t co-sponsor those and I had to drag you kicking and screaming to get you to co-sponsor my articles on the border. Who’s really been making the push?”

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News outlet Politico and the New York Times reported that the previous Sunday night Greene had dined with former president Donald Trump and briefed him on the plans to try impeach Biden. Undoubtedly he would have approved – Trump has a number of times accused Biden and his family of corruption.

Shortly after his own arraignment in Miami in June over his handling of classified documents, Trump vowed, if re-elected, to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Joe Biden and “the entire Biden crime family”.

[ Right-wing Republicans have been itching to impeach Biden for years ]

Trump has also wondered aloud why Biden has not been impeached – as was himself twice when president.

In a social media post last month, Trump signalled to House Republicans why he believed Biden should be impeached. And it seemed to have as much to do with political revenge as allegations of corruption. “These low lives impeached me twice (I won) and indicted me four times for nothing,” he said. “Either impeach the bum, or fade into oblivion. They did it to us!”

Impeachment is the process by which a public official at either federal or state level can be charged with acts of wrongdoing and, if convicted, removed forcibly from office, associate professor of government at Cornell University in New York, David Bateman, tells The Irish Times.

However, he says, the standard that needs to be met can be vague. The US constitution sets out the grounds for the impeachment of a president, vice-president and civil officers as “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”. But there are no definitions provided.

Bateman says impeachment is not a legal or criminal process, but a political one.

In the case of attempts to remove a president, the House of Representatives has to vote for impeachment and subsequently there must be a trial in the Senate, with the 100 senators acting as jurors.

[ Biden impeachment inquiry set to deepen divisions in US politics ]

Until recent times, says Bateman, impeachment of presidents happened only rarely but the process was more common at lower level, mainly for those convicted of fraud or other crimes. However, he argues that the standards for impeachment appear to have degraded or eroded more recently.

At the state level, he says, impeachment has a more chequered history.

And the arguments over the merits or otherwise of any Biden impeachment process comes as controversy is brewing in the state of Wisconsin, where Republicans are looking at potentially impeaching a state supreme court judge.

In Wisconsin, as in many other parts of the US, judges are elected.

In April liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz comfortably won a seat on the supreme court, tilting the ideological balance in an institution that had been dominated by conservatives for the past 15 years.

The election involved high stakes for both liberals and conservatives given that the court could consider hugely important issues such as abortion, voting rights and constituency election maps, which critics have condemned as “gerrymandered” to benefit Republicans.

Overall about $45 million was poured into the contest, making it the most expensive judicial election in US history.

The election of Protasiewicz gave liberals a 4-3 majority on Wisconsin’s top court. She was sworn in only last month but has come under fire from Republicans who want her to recuse herself from two cases backed by Democrats that seek to overturn election maps drawn up by their political opponents.

Republicans claim she pre-judged such cases in comments she made during her campaign. In January, Protasiewicz called the state’s legislative maps “rigged” and later said she would “enjoy taking a fresh look at the gerrymandering question”.

Republicans also argue that the judge accepted nearly $10 million in funding from the Wisconsin Democratic Party.

Earlier this year, the Wisconsin judicial disciplinary body dismissed complaints about the judge’s comments in relation to the election maps.

But some Republicans argue she went too far in her comments while campaigning and that she should step back from deciding on the issue of the maps – which could have a crucial role in determining which party wins in the state.

This week the Republican leader in the Wisconsin assembly announced he had created a panel to investigate the criteria for impeachment.

[ Joe Biden did too much with too small a mandate ]

Republicans in the state assembly could impeach Protasiewicz by a simple majority. If that happened her role on the bench would be in limbo until the state Senate made a decision on her future.

Democrats are concerned that Republicans may not hold any Senate hearing on the issue, leaving the judge sidelined indefinitely, the court deadlocked ideologically and the liberal majority removed.

Meanwhile in Washington, the Biden administration has been preparing for some time for House Republicans to push the impeachment button.

Biden himself brushed off the whole issue when he spoke at a private fundraiser on Wednesday night. “Everybody always asked about impeachment. I get up every day, not focused on impeachment. I’ve got a job to do. I’ve got to deal with the issues that affect the American people every single solitary day,” he said.

But earlier that day the White House released a 14-page rebuttal document – essentially speaking notes for anyone debating on the impeachment move – which contended that the Republicans’ investigation into Biden was “all about politics and no evidence”.

McCarthy had argued that there were “serious and credible allegations involving the president’s conduct”.

“These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption, and they warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives,” he said.

But the White House argued that at every turn “their allegations about wrongdoing by Joe Biden have been debunked and refuted by their own witnesses’ testimony, the financial records they have obtained, independent public reporting and more”.

Vice-president Kamala Harris, in a fundraising email, described the Republican impeachment initiative as “theatre with bad actors”.

Cornell University’s Bateman says that even though there have been increasing numbers of presidential impeachment attempts over recent decades, on this occasion things seem different.

Up to now, he says, there has been a set of norms and restraints. In the case of Richard Nixon 50 years ago, he points out, while there were people calling for the president to be removed, an impeachment process did not begin until there was really clear evidence of criminal activity.

[ Joe Biden’s son Hunter and rival Donald Trump may both be before criminal courts in run-up to presidential election ]

“In the case of [Bill] Clinton [in 1998], there were Republicans calling for impeachment, but the [party] leadership was not fully on board [for anything beyond a broad-ranging investigation] and didn’t really commit to impeachment, until they found [something significant], which was lying under oath.”

Bateman adds that in the case of Trump, the then Democrat House speaker Nancy Pelosi initially refused to agree to an impeachment process that some in her party wanted, and changed her mind only after revelations that the president had asked a foreign leader to dig up dirt on his likely political opponent. “And this was seen as such a gross abuse of power, that impeachment had to happen.”

The second Trump impeachment, he points out, came in the wake of the January 6th insurrection.

Batement says the latest impeachment process is being driven by McCarthy’s recognition that he is going to have a very hard fight in the coming weeks over government spending bills for next year and that he needs to make a concession to the far right, which has been seeking to impeach Biden.

“So in that sense, impeachment is very much being degraded as a tool. However, I think even though it has become more common in recent years, it has been held back and held in check until there has been some real evidence of wrongdoing. Up until right now.”