Impeachment won't turf Biden. Here's what Republicans are really trying to achieve
They have one eye on the election, the other on averting a fast-approaching mess in Congress
Of course Republicans announced impeachment hearings. This was the most predictable Washington development save for sticky, sweaty summers and cherry blossoms sprouting every spring.
Another safe likelihood is that, whatever happens in these hearings, U.S. President Joe Biden will not be expelled from office by the Senate, because there aren't the votes for that.
This impeachment process might not even get to a vote in the House of Representatives. Even if it does, the House may not have the votes to impeach, given its microscopic Republican majority.
So why do it?
Why is House Speaker Kevin McCarthy conducting a sudden U-turn, betraying his oft-stated opposition to opening impeachment hearings without at least holding a preliminary vote?
The reason has a bit to do with Biden. And a lot to do with Republicans.
There's undeniable and growing evidence that Biden was, at best, incorrect and, at worst, lying when he insisted his son never drew revenues from China, and that father and son never talked business.
It turns out Hunter Biden did receive lavish payments from a Chinese company previously close to the government in Beijing, and did often introduce his dad to his business partners.
"These allegations paint a picture of a culture of corruption," McCarthy said Tuesday as he announced a snap inquiry, to be run by three committees.
The official rationale is to investigate whether anything nefarious happened — whether there's any truth to allegations that the president touched some of his son's foreign money, and whether any family members broke tax or other laws in the process.
Unproven allegations, to be clear.
Impeachment as currency
But really, the unofficial goal is to buy peace. Peace for McCarthy, the embattled speaker; respite from his ever-restless Republican troops.
And ultimately it's to buy them all clemency from the party's de facto leader, Donald Trump, who has threatened any Republicans who fail to back impeachment with career-ending primary challenges.
That pressure was a factor, says one impeachment-skeptic Republican. Colorado Rep. Ken Buck says Trump's core motivation could be strategic — an electoral distraction, making voters talk about Biden's problems and forget his own multiple criminal charges.
"I can see Donald Trump enjoying this moment," Buck told MSNBC.
Also, bashing Joe Biden is the glue that binds the Republican Party.
And, at this point, McCarthy is in desperate search of a bonding agent.
In just over two weeks, the U.S. government will run out of money, and there will be a shutdown of federal agencies.
Republicans risk ripping each other apart over this. Each other, and their congressional leader.
McCarthy has a mere five-seat majority and lives under constant threat of being ousted as speaker. This is a critical moment for him — he somehow must please various factions of his caucus and pass a budget bill.
One political scientist likens it to a tradeoff: An impeachment process gets launched, in exchange for budget votes.
But David Bateman, a professor at the department of government at Cornell University, opines that this, obviously, is not an ideal way to run a legislature.
"This is corrosive," he said.
"[It's saying], 'We're going to have to get appropriations passed. So we have to impeach the president.' … This is a concession Kevin McCarthy is making to the far right."
'Immediate, total compliance'
The worst news for McCarthy is it might not work. Several hardliners in his caucus made clear they will keep pushing for deep spending cuts, cuts that have little chance of passing the House, and no chance of passing the Senate.
That's setting aside other spending dilemmas dividing the right-wing ranks, like whether to keep funding Ukraine's defence.
But wait — there's more. Much more. Right after the announcement, a McCarthy nemesis threatened to try removing him as speaker.
Matt Gaetz, in a congressional floor speech, laid out a list of demands including defunding investigations into Trump, subpoenaing Hunter Biden to testify in Congress, voting on congressional term limits and balanced budgets, and releasing all surveillance videos from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Failing that, the Florida firebrand promised to force votes, day after day, to oust the speaker.
"[We want] immediate, total compliance. Or [we] remove you," Gaetz said.
The most incendiary allegation
The Republicans also say the pressure of a formal inquiry could help force the release of certain documents.
For example, one of the inquiry leaders, James Comer, is demanding government documents and communications about Hunter Biden's role in the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor in 2016, when Joe Biden was vice-president.
The Obama administration's version of what happened: It was U.S. and allied policy to remove a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor.
Republicans' allegation: They have a transcript from an FBI interview with an anonymous informant who claimed the head of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, claimed to him, years ago, that he paid off both Bidens, father and son, by hiring Hunter Biden to a lucrative board position, for help firing the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to end a corruption investigation.
This is the most incendiary allegation against Biden. The Democrats, and others, say it's full of holes, including no evidence Shokin was fighting corruption.
However it's not actually clear that impeachment changes much in terms of accessing records: Bateman says congressional committees already have broad subpoena powers, and this doesn't add to them.
What about the election?
The parties will now claw for advantage on the battleground that truly matters — the mind of American voters, who will decide the 2024 election.
In a preview of the Democratic message, top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries said the real scandal here is Republicans having no agenda to address what really matters to voters.
Jeffries said his party will defend the president's integrity now, next week, next year, and forever.
"President Joe Biden is a good man, he's an honest man, he's a patriotic man," Jeffries told reporters Tuesday.
But while predicting the start of impeachment was easy, predicting the political fallout is harder.
Past impeachment votes did not hurt, and possibly improved, Bill Clinton's approval ratings in 1998 and Donald Trump's in 2019.
One expert on polling says that's a minuscule sample size that tells us nothing useful about contemporary public opinion.
What's more useful is watching fundamental, structural trends, says Marc Trussler, director of data research at the University of Pennsylvania Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies.
These include the economy, the unemployment rate over the next year, and the gravitational pull of partisan allegiance, which gets stronger the closer we get to an election.
He makes two predictions in the meantime.
In the short run, he says, Biden will see a dip in the polls, maybe as much as five percentage points, depending on how extensively the media cover the substance of the hearings.
In the long run, as voters start paying closer attention to the election, and the pull of partisanship exerts itself, Democratic-leaners will vote Democrat and Republican-leaners will vote Republican.
And the bottom line, in Trussler's view: "I cannot see it affecting the election."
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