NB: "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
Abraham Lincoln addressing the Illinois Republican State Convention,
Springfield, Illinois June 16, 1858
The above was the old pre-Southern Strategy, pre-Strom Thurmond,
pre-Donald Trump Republican Party. Although that older Republican Party
was the party of Richard Nikon, even the conservatives of the Nixon
epoch, such as Barry Goldwater, told Nikon that he was done as President
after Watergate, and would vote to impeach Mr. Nixon.
End NB.
https://news.yahoo.com/majority-sight-republicans-hush-talk-174412021.html
The New York Times
With Majority in Sight, Republicans Hush Talk of Impeaching Biden
Annie Karni
Fri, October 28, 2022 at 10:44 AM·7 min read
WASHINGTON — Since the day President Joe Biden took office, Republicans
have publicly called for his impeachment, introducing more than a dozen
resolutions accusing him and his top officials of high crimes and
misdemeanors and running campaign ads and fundraising appeals vowing to
remove him from office at the first opportunity.
But in the homestretch of a campaign that has brought the party
tantalizingly close to winning control of Congress, top Republicans are
seeking to downplay the chances that they will impeach Biden, distancing
themselves from a polarizing issue that could alienate voters just as
polls show the midterm elections breaking their way.
“I think the country doesn’t like impeachment used for political
purposes at all,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the minority leader,
told Punchbowl News this month. Although he didn’t rule out moving
forward on impeachment hearings if something rose “to that occasion,”
McCarthy said the country needed to “heal” and that voters wanted to
“start to see the system that actually works.”
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Still, should he become House speaker, McCarthy would be under immense
pressure from hard-right members of his rank and file — and from core
Republican voters who swept his party into the majority in part based on
promises to take down Biden — to impeach. The pressure will only
increase if former President Donald Trump adds his voice to those
pushing for the move.
It is just one of a series of confounding issues McCarthy would face as
speaker, testing his grip on power and bearing heavy consequences for
Biden and the country.
“There have already been impeachment articles, and I expect you’ll get
more of that in the next Congress,” said former Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va.
“There’s certainly going to be pressure for this to go.”
Some influential Republicans have been moving aggressively toward
impeachment for years, demanding punishment for Biden and his
administration as well as vengeance for Democrats’ two impeachments of
Trump.
“Joe Biden is guilty of committing high crimes and misdemeanors,” Rep.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., wrote in a recent fundraising email. “And
it’s time for Congress to IMPEACH, CONVICT, and REMOVE Biden from office.”
Greene has already introduced five articles of impeachment against
Biden, including one the day he took office, when she accused him of
abusing his power while serving as vice president to benefit his son
Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine.
Privately, many Republican lawmakers and staff members concede that
there does not appear to be any clear-cut case of high crimes and
misdemeanors by Biden or members of his Cabinet that would meet the bar
for impeachment.
But McCarthy has hardly rejected the prospect. Pressed recently on
whether Biden or any officials in his administration deserved to be
impeached, he said, “I don’t see it before me right now.”
The response reflected an awareness that impeachment — as commonplace as
it has become — is deeply unpopular. A national University of
Massachusetts Amherst poll released in May showed that 66% of voters
oppose impeachment, including 44% who said they strongly oppose the move.
One of the concerns Democrats have expressed about electing a Republican
majority in the House is that it would result in gridlock and dysfunction.
“Nothing symbolizes that more than the idea of a whole-cloth impeachment
of President Biden,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster.
Still, many Republican lawmakers and candidates likely to be elected to
the House next month have been running on the issue, creating a
groundswell of pressure for McCarthy, who would need their votes to
become speaker.
“I say if you’re the commander in chief and you invite an invasion on
our southern border, if you’re the commander in chief and you leave
Americans on the battlefield in Afghanistan to fall into the hands of
the Taliban, what are we supposed to do with you?” Joe Kent, a
Republican and 2020 election denier running for a House seat in
Washington state, said in a radio interview. “This is exactly why we
have the ability to impeach presidents.”
Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., ran a television advertisement over the
summer calling for impeachment proceedings against Biden. “Whether it is
Joe Biden’s dereliction of duty at the southern border or his disastrous
retreat in Afghanistan, I have called for Joe Biden to answer to the
American people in impeachment hearings,” Tenney says in the ad.
Overall, 10 House Republicans have either introduced or sponsored a
total of 21 articles of impeachment against Biden and his top officials
since the start of the administration.
The charges include a broad variety of offenses, including a failure to
enforce immigration laws, a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and the
extension of a moratorium on residential evictions. In addition to a
dozen against Biden, there is a single article against Vice President
Kamala Harris; two each against Secretary of State Antony Blinken and
Alejandro Mayorkas, homeland security secretary; and four against
Attorney General Merrick Garland.
In a recent interview with The New York Times Magazine, Greene shrugged
off McCarthy’s equivocation about impeachment.
“I think people underestimate him, in thinking he wouldn’t do it,” she
said, adding that a Speaker McCarthy would give her “a lot of power and
a lot of leeway” in order to fulfill his job and “please the base.”
Democrats, too, assume that McCarthy will not be able to resist the
pressure to impeach Biden — all the more so if Trump is running for
president in 2024 and wants what he sees as retribution for his two
impeachments. The White House has spent months preparing for the
possibility.
The challenge McCarthy faces is similar to the one that House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., confronted during the 2018 midterm election
campaign, when a small but vocal group of progressives was demanding
Trump’s impeachment. Back then, she and other leading Democrats toiled
to avoid publicly talking about the subject, wary of distractions from
their message that could alienate independent voters and cost them their
chance at winning control of the House.
The task grew more difficult after they won; immediately after she was
sworn in to Congress in 2019, for instance, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.,
told supporters “we’re going to impeach” Trump, using an expletive to
refer to him.
Even after Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian
interference in the 2016 election, documented multiple instances of
obstruction of justice by Trump, House Democrats were cautious about
pursuing impeachment. It took nine months to get Pelosi on board.
“People can be very critical of Biden on political or policy grounds,”
said Norman Eisen, who served as a lawyer for Democrats during the first
impeachment of Trump. “But those are not high crimes and misdemeanors —
not even close. If it’s politically difficult to do impeachment when you
have compelling proof of multiple high crimes, how much more so when
there’s no evidence of constitutional crimes?”
It can also be politically risky, if past impeachments are any guide.
The impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998 backfired badly on
House Republicans, making Clinton more popular than at any other time of
his presidency; Democrats picked up five seats in the House that fall.
Newt Gingrich, the House speaker who quit Congress after Clinton’s
impeachment amid ethics allegations and Republican losses, said he was
advising McCarthy against it.
“All you have to do is say to people, ‘Kamala Harris,’” Gingrich said.
“Tell me the endgame that makes any sense. As bad as Biden is, she’d be
vastly worse. I don’t think the brand-new Republican majority should
waste their time on a dead end.”
Karl Rove, a Republican strategist and founder of a constellation of
Republican fundraising groups, also said the party would want to focus
on other priorities.
“Most Republican members are going to say: ‘Really? We’re going to waste
our time and energy on this when there’s no chance in hell of two-thirds
of the Senate voting to convict?’” Rove said. “Instead of combating
inflation, freeing up American energy, fighting the wokeness, we’re
going to engage in this?”
It takes a majority in the House to impeach a president but two-thirds
in the Senate to convict and remove one from office.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who is in line to be the chair of the Judiciary
Committee if his party wins control of the House, has floated the
possibility of impeachment but more recently has taken a less-committal
stance.
“That’s a call for the committee, for Republicans on the committee, in
consultation with the entire conference,” he said in a recent interview.
Asked whether Republican voters were demanding impeachment, Jordan said:
“Voters are demanding the facts and the truth.”
