GOP impeachment dilemma: Follow rules or Pelosi precedent?
Byron York
GOP IMPEACHMENT DILEMMA: FOLLOW RULES OR PELOSI PRECEDENT? House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced today that Republicans will begin an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden’s business dealings with son Hunter Biden and other Biden family members. “These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction, and corruption and warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives,” McCarthy said. “That’s why today I am directing our House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.”
The question vexing McCarthy in recent weeks was whether to open an impeachment inquiry only after a vote of the full House authorizing the inquiry or whether to push ahead without full House approval. Last month, McCarthy told Breitbart that “if we move forward with an impeachment inquiry, it would occur through a vote on the floor of the People’s House and not through a declaration by one person.” But there were always doubts about whether Republicans had enough votes to pass an inquiry authorization. Now, McCarthy has decided to declare an inquiry just on his own authority.
Hanging over the whole process was the precedent set by McCarthy’s immediate predecessor, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). In her obsession to pursue then-President Donald Trump, Pelosi impeached Trump twice and cut corners both times. In the first impeachment, over Ukraine in late 2019, Pelosi simply declared an inquiry to be underway without relying on any vote. She hand-picked Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), chairman of the Intelligence Committee, to run it, passing over Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which was the normal path for impeachments. Schiff and Pelosi cut minority Republicans out of the process and raced ahead in an effort to impeach Trump by the end of 2019 in hopes that impeachment would greatly diminish Trump’s chances of reelection in 2020.
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McCarthy was leading the Republicans at the time and quickly realized that the Democrats’ shortcuts and precedent-busting created a fairness problem that could unite GOP lawmakers against Pelosi’s effort. I talked to McCarthy extensively about the issue for my book Obsession. I’m going to excerpt a few paragraphs to give you an impression of how McCarthy viewed impeachment at the time, in the fall of 2019:
McCarthy had been thinking in theoretical terms about how Republicans would respond to an impeachment ever since the GOP lost the House majority in November 2018. Now, he had something specific to consider. He assigned staff to study the Nixon and Clinton impeachments. He examined how Democrats had worked to slow and undermine the GOP Benghazi investigation just a few years earlier. He started thinking about how Republicans could best oppose what he was increasingly convinced Schiff and Pelosi were going to do.
Then, on Sept. 24, when Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry, McCarthy’s planning became a reality. … Pelosi had just announced an impeachment inquiry entirely on her own, with no House vote, ignoring precedent, cutting corners, and denying minority rights. McCarthy understood that that could become a rallying point for Republicans. “The first thing I thought was, if they’re going to impeach, process matters,” McCarthy recalled.
When McCarthy was home in Bakersfield, California, he would take his dog (Mac, an Australian Shepherd) out for a run and at the same time check in with Republican members by phone. He remembered a specific moment when he realized that Republicans had to frame the impeachment as a matter of fairness. “It dawns on me that the first thing I have to do is set the stage on this,” he remembered. He would write a letter to Pelosi outlining the various ways in which she was ignoring precedent and fair play. But even though the letter was addressed to the Speaker, it really wasn’t for her. It was for House Republicans, to unite them against the process then getting underway…
McCarthy sent the letter to the Speaker on Oct. 3. “I am writing to request you suspend all efforts surrounding your ‘impeachment inquiry’ until transparent and equitable rules and procedures are established to govern the inquiry, as is customary,” McCarthy wrote. There was absolutely zero chance that would happen, but the purpose was for McCarthy to list the procedures — “key historical precedents or basic standards of due process” — that Democrats were bypassing. McCarthy put them in the form of ten questions, among them:
“Do you intend to hold a vote of the full House authorizing your impeachment inquiry?” “Do you intend to involve the full House in each critical step of this inquiry, including defining its scape and establishing its rules and procedures?” “Do you intend to provide the president’s counsel the right to attend all hearings and depositions?” “Do you intend to provide the president’s counsel the right to cross-examine witnesses?” And “Do you intend to refer all findings on impeachment to Chairman Nadler and the Judiciary Committee, as prescribed by Rule X of the Rules of the House, or is Chairman Schiff in charge of leading this inquiry, as has been reported in the press?”
Pelosi responded immediately, telling McCarthy to get lost. She didn’t need no stinking rules and procedures. And so Democrats raced ahead with their impeachment inquiry, including Republicans when they chose and excluding them when they chose. As McCarthy had guessed, the Democratic stiff-arming united Republicans. GOP members had varying opinions on Trump, but they were together against Pelosi. In the end, every single House Republican voted against the first Trump impeachment.
Now McCarthy is the speaker, and many in his Republican conference want to impeach Biden. Until today, he had wrestled with the question of whether or not to hold off until he could go forward with impeachment in compliance with the old rules, as he vainly urged Pelosi to do in 2019. The alternative was to recognize that Pelosi made new rules in the first Trump impeachment — and then cut even more corners in the super-quickie second Trump impeachment in 2021 — and that today’s Republicans do not have to observe the old precedents. They can follow Pelosi’s precedent, which is the speaker can do what he or she wants. McCarthy chose the new rules. In her manic pursuit of Trump, Pelosi changed the way impeachment works in the House, and there is apparently no going back.
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