'Abuse of power': Republicans admit Biden impeachment effort based more on politics than substance
Several House Republicans may have inadvertently admitted that the evidence to impeach President Joe Biden is flimsy at best during a recent meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana).
While speaking with Johnson about their ongoing impeachment efforts, some moderate House Republicans questioned whether their caucus' ongoing effort to impeach the 46th president of the United States was still feasible, according to the Washington Post.
In a Friday article, the Post's Jacqueline Alemany reported that "Johnson appeared to agree with Republican lawmakers who argued that since Biden’s polling numbers have been so weak, there is less of a political imperative to impeach him," citing Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska), who was present during the meeting.
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"Is it pragmatic? Does it make sense? Connecting those dots matter," Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Oregon) told the Post. “So I don’t think it makes sense to move down a road unless those dots can be connected."
MSNBC columnist Ruth Ben-Ghiat — a scholar and expert on authoritarian regimes around the world — tweeted in response to the article that "abuse of power could not be more clearly expressed."
"[I]f Biden is an electoral threat you impeach him on spurious grounds," she said of House Republicans' impeachment campaign.
The House GOP's impeachment inquiry originated after former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) gave it a green light in September. At the time, the Associated Press reported McCarthy's gesture was a means of appeasing hard-line members of his caucus angry about his bipartisan efforts to avoid a government shutdown.
House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky) is Republicans' lead crusader in the impeachment battle. Comer insists that President Biden should be investigated for "shady business practices," citing two loans Biden made to his brother James in the amount of $40,000 and $200,000. Both of those loans were made in between Biden's tenure as Barack Obama's vice president and his own administration, and have since been repaid.
However, Rep. Comer has not yet responded to allegations reported by the Daily Beast in which Kentucky property records show the Congressman engaged in a transaction with his own brother for roughly the same amount.
"In one deal — also involving $200,000, as well as a shell company — the more powerful and influential Comer channeled extra money to his brother, seemingly from nothing," the Beast reported. "Other recent land swaps were quickly followed with new applications for special tax breaks, state records show — all of this, perplexingly, related to the dealings of a family company that appears to have never existed on paper."
Outside of Comer, House Republicans admit there's "more work to be done" on both the Oversight Committee and the House Judiciary Committee in order to successfully make the case for Biden's impeachment.
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"[I]t’s got to be ironclad, and it’s got to be right before we start talking the ‘i’ word," Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-California) told the Post.
