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At some point over the next day or two, the Republican-led House is very likely to hold a vote on whether to authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. It’s not yet certain how the vote will turn out — if four or more GOP members balk at their party’s plan, the measure will fail — but far-right lawmakers are doing their best to twist arms, and there’s evidence to suggest those efforts are working.
It’s less clear why.
To hear Republican members tell it, at the heart of the crusade is a “controversy” from eight years ago. In 2015, the Obama administration, European diplomats, the International Monetary Fund, among other international organizations, leaned on the Ukrainian government to fire a man named Viktor Shokin, who served as the country’s top prosecutor. The Western world — including many congressional Republicans — wanted Shokin’s ouster because he was notoriously lax on investigating corruption.
In his capacity as the sitting vice president, Biden played a prominent role in forcing Kyiv’s hand and getting the Ukrainian government to sack Shokin.
GOP officials now claim the effort was part of some kind of nefarious scheme to help Hunter Biden, which in turn justifies the impeachment push. As Axios reported overnight, the House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry “is predicated on allegations about the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor that have been debunked — under oath — by at least nine government witnesses.”
In other words, the foundation for this obviously foolish endeavor appears to have some dramatic cracks.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is proceeding anyway, apparently indifferent to the fact that his party has uncovered no incriminating evidence against the sitting president, and equally indifferent to the standards he claimed to take seriously just a few years ago. CNN reported:
Just four years ago, Johnson blasted Democrats for opening an impeachment inquiry into Trump largely along party lines less than a year before the next presidential election — the exact circumstances Johnson finds himself in now. In radio interviews reviewed by CNN, Johnson criticized Democrats for using what he called “gerrymandered facts” in their 2019 impeachment inquiry. ... He argued the Democrats’ grievances against Trump should be settled by voters and not through such an extreme remedy as impeachment.
In case anyone’s forgotten, around this time four years ago, Democrats had Trump dead to rights. The then-Republican president tried to extort a U.S. ally in the hopes that a foreign government would interfere in our elections and help him win.
The Associated Press published a rather brutal analysis shortly before Thanksgiving 2019, highlighting the “mountain of evidence” of Trump’s guilt that was uncontested and “beyond dispute.” The facts, the AP added, were “confirmed by a dozen witnesses, mostly staid career government officials who served both Democratic and Republican administrations. They relied on emails, text messages and contemporaneous notes to back up their recollections.”
At the time, Johnson said it didn’t matter. “If you don’t like the president, he goes on a ballot again after four years,” the Louisiana Republican said in a December 2019 interview. “We have an election in 11 months. Let the people decide this.”
Note, this isn’t a dynamic in which both parties have conveniently traded talking points. We don’t see Democrats currently running around, defending Biden by saying there’s an election coming up, and if voters have a problem with the allegations, they can vote against him.
Rather, Democrats are instead saying that the allegations are idiotic and the whole process is a brazen, evidence-free sham.
Johnson, meanwhile, has positioned himself as shameless hypocrite, abandoning the principles he pretended to take seriously when it was his partisan ally in the Oval Office.
Pressed for an explanation, the House speaker’s office told CNN, “The Speaker’s commentary on the House Democrat impeachment effort was true then and is true now. The 2019 impeachment of President Trump remains infamous for using the thinnest evidentiary record and narrowest grounds ever to impeach a President. Today, the House is taking a decidedly different approach. The House will depose witnesses, gather evidence, establish a record, and only present Articles if the evidentiary record supports such action.”
None of this is even remotely true. The evidence behind the impeachment push was overwhelming in 2019, and it’s non-existent in 2023. Johnson almost certainly understands this, though he doesn’t appear to care.