House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced on Tuesday that he will support impeachment inquiries into President Biden, caving to pressure from what was once the party's lunatic fringe but is now clearly the GOP mainstream. Lacking support for impeachment from his own caucus, McCarthy won't even hold a vote of the full House of Representatives before plowing ahead with what will be a doomed quest that will nevertheless further degrade the legitimacy of our political institutions. But that makes sense, because fruitless theater is about all the GOP, a party with neither a policy platform nor leaders with the stature to fight for one, has left.
There are times when you almost feel sorry for McCarthy. The erstwhile fiscal conservative "young gun" who went to DC to slash entitlements and make rich people richer has somehow become the leader of a group of wild-eyed radicals who are so far down the rabbit hole of conspiracy and what-aboutism that they think they are going to impeach President Biden. After half-heartedly resisting them for most of the year, McCarthy has faced reality—in order to remain speaker, he must do their bidding—despite the fact he knows perfectly well it will end in failure and political ruin.
Membership in the select group of weirdos and grifters that now runs the Republican Party is determined entirely by whether you are willing to sign on to a life of Newsmax-fueled hallucinating while siphoning money from the rubes. Are you willing to hawk woo-woo pills for gun nuts while pretending to believe that pedophiles in pizza shops are the real power brokers in American society? Well then, today's Republican Party is for you.
As for President Biden's alleged high crimes and misdemeanors, Republicans will surely get back to you at some point about that. Something mumblemumble Burisma China laptop cocaine. It doesn't need to make any sense because this isn't about Joe Biden or Hunter Biden. It's about former President Donald Trump. Democrats impeached him twice, and deservedly so. According to the rules of contemporary Republican politics, that means the next Democratic president must be impeached, whether he deserves it or not. Look, they've said as much, and it doesn't make much sense to pretend otherwise. Profiles in Courage this is not.
To recap for you—Biden's son Hunter is a deeply troubled, middle-aged man who spent his misbegotten youth trying, among other things, to use his father's name and connections to get rich. This led to a series of puzzling escapades that included him joining the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma while his father was vice president. He has a drug problem. He may go to prison on a gun charge. He dangled his dad's name to potential investors and clients. His personal life would be sordid even for a C-list Hollywood celebrity. But the worst you can say about it all is that perhaps his dad has been far too indulgent of him for far too long. He should have turned down Hunter's dinner invitations.
In terms of impeaching the president of the United States, McCarthy and his allies have absolutely nothing and they know it. Saying the phrase "Biden Crime Family" over and over cannot actually bring this piece of conceptual art into being. Despite spending months pouring over tens of thousands of pages of financial records, they have yet to produce a shred of evidence that Biden so much as greased the skids for Hunter's big adventures.
It is the purest example yet of Trump Republicans accusing other people of things they are guilty of themselves. This is a group of people that has spent the better part of two years whining petulantly about the "weaponization of the federal government" and calling for the abolition of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Here they are frog marching their hapless leader into an unwinnable confrontation, the centerpiece of which is malevolently abusing the House's investigatory powers. They are doing this not to find evidence of the wrongdoing most of them know perfectly well isn't there, but to create the false appearance of equivalence between the likely 2024 nominees for president, one of whom is a lifelong con artist facing 91 charges and counting across four jurisdictions, and one of whom maybe loved his son too much and should have been more interested in avoiding the appearance of impropriety.
But thanks to the American people's decision to hand the House to Republicans last November, this bottomless pit of derp and disingenuity will dominate headlines up to and through the next presidential election. That's American politics right now: a party no one likes leading an investigation about something no one cares about, ignoring our many real and pressing problems in the process, all as the set-up to a presidential election between two candidates no one wants to run in the first place.
Enjoy.
David Faris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
