2y ago

House Republicans line up behind McCarthy on the Biden impeachment seesaw

www.politico.com House Republicans line up behind McCarthy on the Biden impeachment seesaw

The speaker and his members are caught between two competing forces: conservative eagerness to target the president and skittishness from members in battleground seats.

They have nothing to contribute because they have no higher priority than themselves.

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This is all about delegitimizing the impeachment process itself. Trump getting impeached twice was historically relevant because it stood as tangible evidence of him being one of the worst presidents in history and easily the worst of the last 50 years. The Republican narrative remains that those impeachments were politically motivated and not based on any valid legal or ethical concerns. So now they're going to do what they accused Democrats of doing and deliberately make a mockery of impeachment.
The point of this isn't to actually punish anyone in the Biden administration. It's an inconvenience at worst and they know it. The point is to make impeachment a joke. Something one party in Congress does to the other in the White House as a regular and inconsequential thing, just part of the theater of it all. This retroactively defangs Trump's impeachments in the eyes of people on both sides who aren't dialed into politics and really only pay attention every 4 years and skim the occasional headline. It also preemptively reduces the gravity of any future impeachments of Republican Presidents because impeachment becomes routine and therefore mundane to the average person.
Basically the Republicans don't like checks and balances that require them to behave like civilized, functional adults doing their jobs, so they're just going to smear their shit on those checks and balances until the voters no longer take them seriously and forget they ever had any real meaning. And it will work too.
- I mean, impeachment is a political tool, and I never felt like it had meaning ever since I was a child and they had to debate what the word "is" means with Saxophone Bill. Congress has been a completely different world devoid of connection to the real world for too long now. Back in the day if Trump had said that shit a southern Democrat would have beat the fuck out of him in the middle of congress and caved his head half in with their walking stick. Obviously we need to get back to that time, get some Darwin going in the house and senate so you are not likely to live to 90 doing it. (Source: https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/The_Caning_of_Senator_Charles_Sumner.htm)
  Or anything at this point. How long until American's can seek asylum in Europe?
  
  That was shortly before we had a Civil War, so I don't think that's an era we should hope to recreate nowadays.

I've yet to hear any Republican level an actual charge against Biden for impeachment. When Trump was impeached, we knew exactly why the impeachment proceedings were happening both times.
Republicans are just engaging in a reckless and cynical stunt to get revenge on Biden for beating Trump.
- WaPo put together a list of the supposed reason for impeachment and who proposed the idea. They are all crazy pants:
  Impeachment threats
  President Biden: Afghanistan withdrawal (Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, others)
  Biden: border security (Greene, Reps. Bob Gibbs, Bill Posey and Andrew Ogles)
  Biden: Hunter Biden’s business dealings (Greene, Ogles, Reps. Jim Banks, Claudia Tenney, others)
  Biden: covid-19 eviction moratorium (Greene, Gibbs)
  Biden: selling oil from strategic reserve to foreign nations (Greene)

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