Stop acting shocked Republicans follow suit after Democrats smash the guardrails
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Contrary to the Associated Press‘s inane assertion that the case implicating Joe Biden in his son’s corruption is “without evidence,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has decided to open an impeachment inquiry into the president thanks to a bevy of evidence, including multiple witnesses, emails, and WhatsApp messages indicating that the elder Biden benefited from Hunter Biden‘s legally questionable business dealings. But what makes the media even more apoplectic is that the California Republican has opened up his inquiry without a vote.
The media fulmination, of course, ignores the crucial fact that it was McCarthy’s predecessor who set the precedent here. Back in 2019, when McCarthy warned Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) that she lacked the votes to succeed in opening an inquiry into the first impeachment of Donald Trump, the San Francisco Democrat laughed him off, making the anomalous decision to open the inquiry without a vote.
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We’ve seen this playbook countless times before, but most hysterically with Harry Reid’s decision to nuke the judicial filibuster as Senate majority leader: Democrats smash historic guardrails, and then when Republicans follow suit, the former feign shock and awe that they cannot put Pandora back in the box.
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“Norms,” “standards,” and “conventions” are called such because these agreed-upon rules only persist when both sides respect them as normal, standard, and a matter of common convention. Once Democrats decide they can gain a short-term advantage by smashing the glass, the guardrails do not naturally restore themselves once Republicans return to the helm of power: They are gone, forever.
Republicans are correct not to obliterate these standards on their own. One can only imagine the trillions spent and combustion engines banned by Joe Biden if Donald Trump had cowered to pressure and abolished the legislative filibuster. But in terms of the new rules created by Nancy Pelosi, McCarthy is just following them to a T.