House Republicans’ Impeachment Push Is Pure Theater. By Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

There’s no evidence to indicate any wrongdoing by the president, yet right-wing members of Congress are determined to peddle their fiction.

December 15, 2023 at 5:41 PM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

The House Republicans’ vote this week to formally authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden is pointless and totally symbolic — a complete triumph of the drive to provide programming for GOP-aligned media over anything resembling doing the nation’s business.

Republicans have found no evidence that the president has done anything wrong and yet they are charging ahead anyway.1Republicans have spent years looking into Hunter Biden’s various foreign business adventures without finding any evidence that Joe Biden was involved with his son’s business or that it influenced his actions in office. The investigations accelerated when Republicans gained a majority in the House this year and several committees made them a priority. Yet, as the New York Times reported, the investigations have “failed to produce evidence of anything approaching high crimes or misdemeanors” — something several Republicans admitted, even as they voted for the formal inquiry.

While Republicans and media reports have demonstrated that Hunter Biden cashed in on his father’s name — something unseemly, but that presidential families have regularly done — that’s pretty much the beginning and end of the scandal. Hunter Biden is facing criminal charges in a federal tax case, but there is nothing that connects it to his father.

Not that any of this matters to House Republicans. The hallmark of this smear campaign of an “investigation” is to make accusations and then when they’re debunked just keep repeating them, ignoring evidence that clearly refutes them.

The most notable of these episodes is the claim that as vice president, Biden forced out a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating a company that had Hunter Biden on its board of directors. The accusation comes with a supposed smoking gun of a video in which Biden brags about having gone after the prosecutor. The problem is they have the story completely wrong. As people have been explaining for years to Ohio Representative Jim Jordan and other Republicans, Biden was following a policy established by President Barack Obama and NATO allies — who believed (correctly, it turns out) that the prosecutor was failing to go after corrupt Ukrainian businesses, including the one whose board Hunter Biden served. It wasn’t tricky or complicated, in fact it was all public at the time so there’s a clear record of everything that happened. But Jordan and his colleagues simply ignore the true story and continue to peddle their fictional version.

The same is true of the other claims they’ve made against the president. They’re quickly debunked, but rather than contesting the evidence or dropping the accusations, Republicans ignore the truth and continue repeating the lies.

Until they at least drop the Ukrainian prosecutor story, don’t pay attention to anything they say. They’re simply not serious, and it’s safe to assume that none of their accusations have merit.

There are important procedural questions involved here, however, well beyond the obvious one that the House shouldn’t impeach a president or even threaten it without any actual evidence of wrongdoing.2

As Democrats correctly argued four years ago when they were on the path to impeaching Donald Trump for the first time, changes in House rules and procedures have made formal authorization votes for impeachment investigations obsolete. During the Watergate era, such a vote was necessary to authorize the investigating committees to issue subpoenas and do the other things necessary for a thorough inquiry. But today, House rules already give the committees sufficient power.

That doesn’t just make Wednesday’s impeachment inquiry authorization vote superfluous. By going through with it, the House is conceding that they’re entitled to conduct serious investigations only in the most grave cases, when there is good reason to suspect that the president or other executive branch official has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. That’s what the Trump White House argued, and the Biden White House too. The House should never concede that. Congress is entitled to investigate pretty much anything it wants and it shouldn’t need the excuse of an impeachment to issue enforceable subpoenas and otherwise gather information.

Which gets to the important point: It’s perfectly fine for House Republicans to investigate these events, either because of suspicions that further evidence will eventually implicate the president, or even to just embarrass the White House by parading Hunter Biden’s foibles (or worse) in front of cameras.3And while it’s also fine for the president to fight overly intrusive demands and attempt to negotiate deals that limit what Congress can obtain, the courts if called upon should be generously disposed toward Congress in these matters. Congress is responsible for legislating for the nation and that requires broad powers to obtain information.

Meanwhile, of course this impeachment effort is a joke and yet another black mark against House Republicans. But more importantly, it’s bad for the nation.

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