House GOP would dig own grave by rushing to impeach Biden
Quin Hillyer
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One of the worst mistakes political movements can make, at least in a constitutional republic, is the error of overkill. In that light, it would be monumentally stupid for House Republicans to rush into an impeachment inquiry regarding President Joe Biden.
To be clear, the mistake would be of both substance and politics. The former ought to be more important, but it is the latter consideration that should convince most Republican politicians not to slake their political bloodlust so quickly in this way.
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House Republicans (and some Senate Republicans) already are doing a good job, in their legitimate oversight capacity, of exposing the Biden family’s ethical problems. They need no impeachment inquiry to keep doing so. By prematurely turning their investigations into an impeachment investigation, they make the substantive mistake of treating political grifting as a constitutional matter worthy of a major disruption of representative governance. They simultaneously make the political error of looking overeager for a political scalp rather than reluctantly carrying out a sobering and solemn task, for which there is no other alternative, to serve the public weal.
To put it plainly, the public is sick of and disgusted with politicized death matches. What most of the public sees as tit-for-tat impeachments is exactly what majorities loathe about today’s politics. The public has no problem with exposing graft or with holding the other side’s feet to the fire. But to threaten to kick a president from office is to threaten massive political upheaval of a sort that should be reserved for only rare and serious offenses.
A separate column should be written about why nothing known about the Bidens quite rises (yet) even to the level of considering impeachment. For now, suffice it to say that a vice president knowing about his son’s influence peddling and lying about it is not necessarily a crime nor a systemic offense of the sort the Founding Fathers envisioned when they made presidents subject to impeachment and removal. Some of us, for three years, have consistently blasted Biden Inc. and insisted on greater Justice Department aggressiveness against it yet can recognize that nothing of which the president is even seriously suspected of doing has created a systemic risk to the republic.
Yet because hard-line House conservatives are politicians, it is the political considerations that should supply what James Madison called the defect of better motives. The political reality is that the side that threatens impeachment almost never gains politically from its efforts and often loses big time.
The most obvious example of this phenomenon came when Republicans let themselves look like rabid dogs during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal of 1998. Some of us warned then that even if impeachment was appropriate, which it was, it was sheer political idiocy to treat the whole situation as if the point was to crush Clinton rather than to protect the judicial and constitutional system. Sure enough (as I wrote just last week), Republicans lost seats in the 1998 elections, lost both a speaker and a speaker designee, and substantively lost the best chance ever to reform and save Medicare.
Likewise, in the winter of 1986-87, Democratic bloodlust to use the Iran-Contra controversy to destroy Ronald Reagan’s presidency did them no good. Reagan rebounded nicely, and his vice president was elected to succeed him. And when Democrats impeached former President Donald Trump the first time, Trump actually gained in popularity, reaching a plurality of net approval ratings for the only time in his entire presidency during and immediately after impeachment proceedings.
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Right now, Biden is a monumentally unpopular president and a weak opponent for 2024. Republicans rushing into impeachment could cause a similar backlash of empathy in his favor, making him harder, not easier, to defeat.
Impeachment was meant to be a rare remedy. Political parties that too eagerly embrace it are likely to feel public wrath and probably deserve it.