On the day House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that an impeachment inquiry is going forward, the Biden-Harris campaign responded forcefully.
On Tuesday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he will direct committees to begin an impeachment inquiry of President Biden. The statement received something of a mixed reaction.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a member of the “never Kevin” caucus that opposed McCarthy’s speakership, made a strident anti-McCarthy speech on the House floor that called the impeachment inquiry a “baby step,” and made it clear that he and his colleagues will continue to threaten to use the motion to vacate provision to threaten McCarthy’s speakership. He also called McCarthy’s introduction of the inquiry as “the rushed…and somewhat rattled performance you just saw from the speaker.”
Gaetz, in the floor speech, ran through a litany of things that he claimed McCarthy promised to do in January but has not done, including votes on term limits and a balanced budget, “insufficient accountability for the Biden crime family,” and the deal the speaker made with President Biden in the spring to avoid a debt ceiling breach.
“The path forward for the House of Representatives is either to bring you into immediate total compliance, or remove you,” Gaetz said on the floor of the House.
The Hill reported, meanwhile, that Republicans in the Senate are less than enamored with the impeachment push.
“It’s a waste of time. It’s a fool’s errand,” one Senate Republican said of the impeachment effort.
“Fortunately, it’ll be dispensed with fairly quickly if they ever send articles of impeachment over to us,” the GOP senator added. “We know how this is going to end. It just creates tumult within the conference. I can see it already how people are going to react when they send a message over if they go that far.”
“Maybe this is just Kevin giving people their binkie to get through the shutdown,” the senator said, speculating that McCarthy moved the impeachment inquiry forward in order to get votes to avoid a government shutdown when government funding expires at the end of this month.
Another senator actually went on the record.
“It is frustrating, obviously,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) told The Hill. “I don’t know what the evidence is, where they’re going with this. I’m going to default to the position that the House is going to do what the House is going to do, and we’ll have to react to that.”
Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris campaign released a statement accusing House Republicans of doing the bidding of former President Donald Trump.
“As Donald Trump ramped up his demands for a baseless impeachment inquiry, Kevin McCarthy cemented his role as the Trump campaign’s super-surrogate by turning the House of Representatives into an arm of his presidential campaign,” the Biden campaign statement said. The campaign also criticized McCarthy for, less than two weeks after saying that he would only go forward with an inquiry if he had the votes, doing so without a vote.
The campaign also noted just how weak the case for impeachment is.
“What has changed since then? Several members of the Speaker’s own conference have come out and publicly panned impeachment as a political stunt, pointing out there is no evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden as Republicans litigate the same debunked conspiracy theories they’ve investigated for over four years.”
The House GOP has hinted that they plan to accuse the president of “bribery,” even as they are yet to present solid evidence that anything like that happened.
“While MAGA Republicans spend all of their time attacking President Biden and his family, the president is working every day to make life better for American families across the country. President Biden will remain focused on the issues that matter to everyday Americans—lowering costs, growing the economy, making our communities safe, and protecting Social Security and Medicare—while he tries to bring the country together, not divide us even further,” the statement said.
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Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Stephen has authored thousands of articles over the years that focus on politics, technology, and the economy for over a decade. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @StephenSilver, and subscribe to his Substack newsletter.
