Speaker McCarthy Decides an Impeachment Inquiry Doesn’t Require a Vote of the Full House, After All

The only sensible conclusion to draw from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s sua sponte opening of an impeachment inquiry, rather than putting the question to a vote of the full chamber, is that he is under enormous pressure from his conference’s Trump supporters to orchestrate something that attaches the dread I-word to President Biden.

Of course, every time one partisan dispenses with institutional norms in order to torment the other party, the I-word loses more of its condemnatory force.

It is not that Biden is undeserving of an impeachment inquiry. Even at this preliminary stage, the House’s standing committees, particular the Oversight Committee chaired by Kentucky’s James Comer, have amassed more evidence of potentially impeachable offenses against Biden than the full House had gathered at the time it adopted articles of impeachment against President Trump in 2019 — on a Ukraine transaction so ho-hum that Democrats had trouble coming up with a crime to allege (they settled on “abuse of power,” in addition to defiance of Congress’s subpoenas).

It is a matter of math, not merit.

McCarthy has only a four-vote margin. Eighteen House Republicans hold seats for districts Biden won in 2020. Beyond that, many other Republicans see impeachment as a waste of time: (a) There is no possibility that the Senate would ever convict and remove Biden (even a simple majority would be out of reach with Democrats holding a narrow majority, yet a conviction in the Senate would require a two-thirds’ supermajority), and (b) the investigations under way are making great progress (a recent CNN poll indicates that, despite his numerous denials, Biden is believed by 61 percent of Americans to have been involved in the influence-peddling activities of his son, and 42 percent believe he acted illegally).

Hence, many if not most of these Republicans would oppose an impeachment inquiry if it were put to a vote. Defeat on such a vote would not only be humiliating for McCarthy, it would undermine the important work of the committees. The media-Democratic complex would crow that the Biden investigation is so trivial that even Republicans shot it down.

So McCarthy went Solomonic: The investigations already under way will now be labeled “impeachment inquiry” with no real change, and the speaker’s jittery members will be spared an unwelcome vote.

McCarthy would have been better off doing nothing and letting Comer and the other chairmen plow ahead. Instead, when the committees henceforth demand information from the Biden administration and perhaps other sources, Democrats will argue that compliance is not mandatory because the lack of a House vote renders the investigation illegitimate.

In making that case, Democrats will rely on the protest lines spoken in 2019 by none other than Kevin McCarthy. To be sure, McCarthy can counter that, although he did oppose then-speaker Nancy Pelosi’s unilateral proclamation of an impeachment probe, she overruled him; ergo, he is now merely following the precedent she established. But that point will be dismissed as factitious because Democrats did belatedly conduct a vote authorizing the Ukraine impeachment inquiry — the New York Times is already taking this tack. Press coverage will simply frame McCarthy as a hypocrite, or as a speaker playing a weak hand while being pushed around by “MAGA Republicans.”

The latter charge will have the advantage of being true. Again, if McCarthy had the votes he would submit a resolution for the House’s approval. He’s not a fool — it’s not like he wants to be ridiculed for doing a 180 on his prior insistence that a vote is necessary; but he simply doesn’t have the wherewithal to face down his Trump-supporting critics — who love the idea of pursuing a parallel impeachment proceeding while the former president faces criminal trials brought by the Biden Justice Department and other Democratic prosecutors. (On this point and much more, see Dan McLaughlin’s characteristically persuasive explanation of why impeaching Biden is just but unwise.)

The bigger problem is that if the speaker doesn’t have the votes for a mere impeachment inquiry, it’s highly unlikely he will ever have the votes for impeachment articles. And now that McCarthy has crossed the impeachment Rubicon, at least rhetorically, Biden and his supporters will claim victory if there are no impeachment articles.

As I argued in a New York Post column today, even an impeachment inquiry approved by a House vote would not materially change the state of play. An impeachment committee has only marginally more investigative authority than do the House’s standing committees. What matters here is the politics: Does the public become convinced that Biden deserves impeachment, such that the administration’s stonewalling of something called an “impeachment inquiry” is more damaging than its stonewalling of, say, the Oversight Committee?

On the other hand, Republicans have now raised the stakes of an enterprise they can’t win and may not be able to control — on a matter of great consequence that highlights internal GOP divisions that McCarthy had managed to low-key in the months since the marathon struggle at which he eked out election as speaker. That is not a blueprint for success.