Whither the Impeachment Inquiry?

Give the Democrats this much: The 2019 Ukraine-related impeachment may have involved executive abuse for which a presidential impeachment was a disproportionate response, but once President Trump’s opponents went that route, they were single-minded and relentless.

Not so the current House impeachment inquiry regarding President Biden. It’s been over a week since the first hearing. I thought caterwauling on the right about the first hearing was misplaced. Many complained that there were no new revelations of great moment. To me, that was more a reflection of how far the standing committees (Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means) had advanced public awareness in just eight months.

Try to imagine that you had never heard anything about the Biden-family influence-peddling business before last week (you’ll also have to imagine you hadn’t read Jim’s eye-popping Morning Jolt today). Imagine that last week was the first time you learned that the Bidens had raked in $24 million over a five-year period from agents of corrupt and anti-American foreign powers, that the only commodity provided in exchange was access to Joe Biden’s political power (including during the years when he was vice president), and that the current president was in the scheme up to his neck — since how could he not be given that Joe Biden was the business. I don’t think many people would call that a nothing-burger.

The hearing last week may have seemed like a yawner to some, but that’s because the committees have marshaled all of this damning information — much of which has been public for years but got no sunshine because the media–Democratic complex buried it. Last week’s hearing was pretty standard for the start of an impeachment process: the presentation of expert witnesses who could explain the Constitution’s impeachment process as well as the indicators of suspicious financial transactions and of the Justice Department’s obstruction of its own investigative procedures in sabotaging the “Hunter” Biden investigation. The reasonable expectation was that there would be follow-up hearings at which the presentation of evidence — not just testimony from relevant witnesses but financial records — would take center stage.

All fine, except . . . where are the follow-up hearings? If you tell the country that the president of the United States may be so deeply corrupt that we must consider impeaching him, and you go through the hoo-hah of formally opening an impeachment inquiry, is it really reasonable to then say, “Well, uh, we’ll get back to you in a few weeks”?

You want to tell me this is understandable delay because of the chaos resulting from Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as speaker by a cabal of renegades who had no plan for what they would do if they succeeded in colluding with Democrats to defrock a speaker who had 96 percent Republican support?

Okay . . . but here’s an interesting question then: On what authority is the impeachment inquiry now proceeding?

As I’ve pointed out, it was a dumb move, especially when the standing committees were doing such a good job, to convene an impeachment inquiry without a vote of the full House to authorize an impeachment committee and establish its jurisdiction. Republicans were leading with their chins — they would obviously have preferred to proceed based on a House-enacted resolution, but they didn’t dare propose such a resolution because they lacked the votes. If it had been put to a floor vote, there would have been many more votes against an impeachment-inquiry resolution than there were votes against McCarthy.

But now McCarthy, who purported to authorize the impeachment inquiry by his unilateral authority as speaker, is no longer speaker. And there is no speaker. And, again, there is no resolution authorizing the impeachment inquiry.

So, what is there? Who knows?

I can’t get too whipped up about all this because it’s just theater anyway. If you don’t have the votes even to conduct an impeachment investigation, how are you ever going to have votes for articles of impeachment? And even if you could clear that hurdle (and there is no indication that House Republicans can), everyone knows there is no chance Biden would ever be convicted and removed by the Senate. Plus, if you were serious about impeachment for abuses of power and failure to execute the laws faithfully, how could you not include Biden’s willful evisceration of border enforcement and the invasion of millions of illegal immigrants who are now breaking the border states and cities across the country?

There are no good answers to all this. Not content with serious committee investigations, the renegades insisted they had to have an inquiry that would attach the word impeachment to the name Biden. Lacking the votes, they pressured the speaker into unilaterally authorizing an impeachment inquiry — something the same Kevin McCarthy argued vehemently against in 2019 (as did the Trump Justice Department) when Democrats did it to Trump.

And then, after McCarthy gave them what they wanted, they sacked him. And now . . . what?