With Republican impeachment efforts formalized, it’s useful to consider how views of Biden overlap with views of the 2020 election.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) announcement on Tuesday that his party would move forward with an impeachment inquiry targeting President Biden did not do a particularly good job of explaining the predicate for the decision.
He offered a number of reasons that it was putatively warranted, though at least one of those reasons was untrue and several only demonstrably related to Biden’s son Hunter. In the past, McCarthy has acknowledged that the problem was that his caucus didn’t have information implicating the president and that an impeachment inquiry was a vehicle to get such information. But on Tuesday, he just sort of gave bullet points on a few things you might hear in prime time on Fox News and left it at that.
One interesting aspect of all of this is that, despite the caucus’s earnest, ceaseless and unsuccessful effort to directly show Biden’s involvement in unethical or illegal behavior, a lot of Americans already view the president as corrupt. Propelled in part by an insistent right-wing narrative about culpability, they are convinced that Biden did something illegal.
This reminded me of something: claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Last week, CNN released a poll that showed the extent to which election denialism is still embedded in the public consciousness.
