24 June 2023

Politics With Charles P. Pierce: How to Orchestrate an Impeachment

debt limit bill moves to house rules committee
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We Haven't Seen the Last of the Biden Impeachment Nonsense

Even an incoming Democratic majority is no guarantee that the train will decelerate.

Headshot of Charles P. PierceBy Charles P. Pierce

They really may go through with this. They got slugged in the 2022 midterms, and their majority is very thin, but the Republicans in the House of Representatives appear to be sliding daily toward the ni shagu nazad moment of all time. From The New York Times:

By a vote of 219 to 208, the House referred two articles of impeachment against Mr. Biden — one for abuse of power and one for dereliction of duty — to the Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees. Speaker Kevin McCarthy engineered the move, which allowed the impeachment articles to advance without officially endorsing them. He sought with the referral to defuse pressure from right-wing lawmakers to immediately begin the process of removing Mr. Biden from office, despite a lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.

Me? I find it hard to walk away from that last clause right there.

Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, prompted the action by pushing this week to force a vote on a resolution that accuses Mr. Biden of orchestrating an “invasion” of the United States through lax immigration policies, using language often associated with replacement theory, a racist conspiracy theory that asserts that elites are working to replace white Americans with people of color invading the country.

From the Boebert resolution:

Using the powers of his high office, President Biden 19 has knowingly presided over an executive branch that has continuously, overtly, and consistently violated Federal immigration law by pursuing an aggressive, open-borders agenda by purposefully and knowingly releasing more than 23 2,000,000 illegal aliens into the interior of the United States without the intention or ability to ensure that they appear in immigration court to face asylum or deportation proceedings... President Biden has pursued this open-border agenda purposefully and willfully, circumventing every safeguard, check, and balance required by law, resulting in mass illegal immigration into the United States, to the detriment of the American people.

The code is not exactly secure.

Absent a flip of the House a year from November, I don't see any force within the House to slow this down. McCarthy is clearly hopeless. And even an incoming Democratic majority is no guarantee that the train will decelerate. In 1998, when the Republicans suffered losses in the midterms that were directly connected to the Great Penis Hunt, and when sensible people kept telling them the whole thing was a loser, they went ahead and impeached Bill Clinton anyway. We have not seen the last of this."

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.  

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