The impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden that Kevin McCarthy announced is more like the Benghazi committee targeting Hillary Clinton than Trump being impeached
Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., announced Tuesday that he’s directing House committees to begin a formal impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. McCarthy’s announcement comes a little less than four years after then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced an impeachment inquiry in response to President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against Ukraine.
But despite the similarities in timing and the clearly stated vengeance driving the GOP, Trump’s 2019 impeachment isn’t the best point of comparison for this quixotic attempt to bring down Biden. Neither is the last Republican-led impeachment effort, which, in 1999, resulted in the Senate’s acquitting President Bill Clinton. What McCarthy has ordered the House committees to do is to pursue the strategy Republicans used against President Barack Obama and his administration during the Benghazi scandal.
The biggest difference the burgeoning Biden impeachment inquiry has with Clinton’s and Trump’s first is that no real evidence of wrongdoing by Biden has been uncovered. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee made that point this week, noting that eight months of fervent hunting has turned up bupkis. But McCarthy isn’t worried about evidence; he’s worried about politics. The right flank of his conference (and much of the GOP base) expected an impeachment inquiry to materialize, and some have linked their willingness to keep the government open to moving forward against Biden.
None of the scandals from Obama’s time in office ever hit the impeachment threshold, not when there were enough senior GOP members around who knew that impeaching Clinton hadn’t worked out for them politically.
