Greene throws tantrum over Gaetz stealing her impeachment thunder

Posted on September 12, 2023 by Laura Clawson

House Republicans are moving toward impeaching President Joe Biden for absolutely no wrongdoing—which is exactly what Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has wanted all along. And once again she’s furious, because someone else is taking the credit.

Today, the target of her ire is Rep. Matt Gaetz, who did a victory lap on the claim that his recent threats against Kevin McCarthy’s speakership had made the difference.

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In June, Greene had a public fight with Rep. Lauren Boebert over Boebert’s impeachment push. “I had already introduced articles of impeachment on Joe Biden for the border, asked her to co-sponsor mine—she didn’t,” Greene said at the time. “She basically copied my articles and then introduced them and then changed them to a privileged resolution.”

In short: “Me, me, me! I did it first! How dare they take credit for my idea?”

This is all incredibly petty, showing conclusively that all of these people are in it for the attention—in the form of Fox News hits and lucrative fundraising emails. But it also shows what a terrible organizer Greene is. This has been her big issue for months, and she couldn’t get Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz to sign on? Where exactly did she think she was getting the rest of the votes she needed? Sure, both Boebert and Gaetz may have been waiting for the moment they could individually make a splash with a big show on impeachment, but wouldn’t a good organizer committed to a specific outcome have spent months cultivating them and offering them the opportunities their egos demanded, even if it meant stepping out of the spotlight a little bit?

But no, Greene’s commitment to sole credit is so intense that she doesn't see other people pushing the same issue as opportunities. She doesn't try to court them and work together to build pressure. If what you really want is a specific outcome, you welcome people to the effort. If what you really want is attention, you view other people’s support for the same idea as a threat.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is in this for the attention. And the fact that so many of her fellow House Republicans take the same approach is one of the major reasons they are so ineffective at everything they claim to want to do.

House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry is all vibes, no evidence

Posted on September 12, 2023 by Kerry Eleveld

House Republicans have a sense—a deep intuition—that their political adversary, Democratic President Joe Biden, just might have done something wrong. They are not sure what he did or when he did it, but House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced Tuesday his caucus would open a formal impeachment inquiry to get to the bottom of it once and for all.

Think of it as the "all vibes, no evidence" impeachment inquiry—a perfect encapsulation of the MAGA agenda in action.

Naturally, reality-based commentators on the right and left had thoughts. Pro-democracy conservative David Frum summed up McCarthy's "plan" in a telling tweet:

1) Impeach Biden for his son's sad life.

2) Shut down the government.

3) Federal abortion ban.

4) Impunity for Trump's coup, document thefts, commercial frauds, Kushner's Saudi $2 billion, etc.

5) Find a lobbying job before November 2024.

On the Democratic side, veteran strategist and Hopium Chronicles substacker Simon Rosenberg enumerated "what MAGA is fighting for”:

- The end of American democracy

- Recession, economic ruin, plutocratic tax policy

- Warmer planet, rolling back climate gains

- More guns, more dead kids

- 10 year olds giving birth to their rapist's babies

- Russian victory in Ukraine

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, still manages to serve up some occasional gems, despite being gutted by tech bro Elon Musk. These takes on House Republicans' "all vibes, no evidence" impeachment inquiry certainly qualify.

Freedom Caucus stalwart opposes impeachment, becomes GOP target

Posted on September 12, 2023 by Joan McCarter

Rep. Ken Buck is a prototypical Freedom Caucus member. The Colorado Republican relishes being a maverick, voting his conscience, and fighting with leadership—or with his extremist colleagues—when he feels like it. Now Buck finds himself enmeshed in that “perfect storm” he warned Speaker Kevin McCarthy was coming, and the House Republican majority is turned inside out. Buck is now on the outside of a ridiculous scheme, which has been put into motion by McCarthy, to move forward on impeaching President Joe Biden.

The problem is that Buck remains reality-based. He used to be a federal prosecutor, so he knows some stuff—like the fact that in order to impeach a president, you have to have evidence that they’ve done something impeachable. “The time for impeachment is the time when there’s evidence linking President Biden — if there’s evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor. That doesn’t exist right now,” Buck said in an interview on MSNBC last weekend.

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He called Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s threat to shut the government down if McCarthy didn’t agree to start an impeachment inquiry “absurd.” Now Greene is on the warpath. “This is the same guy that wrote a book called ‘Drain the Swamp’, who is now arguing against an impeachment inquiry,” Greene said. “I really don’t see how we can have a member on Judiciary that is flat out refusing to impeach. … It seems like, can he even be trusted to do his job at this point?”

It’s possible that Buck was involved in ousting Greene from the Freedom Caucus (he had a lot to say about it) a few months ago, or that Greene thinks he was, so she might be going after him for that. One of the reasons Greene was booted was because she was too cozy with leadership—specifically with McCarthy. Whatever the case, there is now a contingent in the House GOP that is aligning themselves with Greene—and apparently leadership—against Buck.

A number of sources told CNN that “there is growing frustration” in the conference, “including among the leadership ranks,” over a number of Buck’s positions, probably stemming back to his vote to certify the 2020 election and his defense of former Rep. Liz Cheney when Republican leadership was kicking her out. He’s also voted against some bills McCarthy considers key to demonstrating his leadership, like the debt ceiling deal and the defense authorization act. These are very Freedom Caucus things to do; Buck has never voted for a debt ceiling authorization because he hates the debt. About half of his fellow caucus members also voted against it.

It’s a hell of a thing. One of the most Freedom Caucus-ish members of the Freedom Caucus is now sounding like a reasonable, sensible, establishment kind of Republican, and leadership is running with the hare-brained impeachment idea. There’s clearly no room for being reality-based in the House with Kevin McCarthy (at least nominally) in charge.

That’s a Republican Party in disarray.

‘MAGA circus’ steamrolls over McCarthy, again

Greene owns McCarthy, and he doesn’t even realize it

Why does it seem like Republicans have such a hard time recruiting Senate candidates who actually live in the states they want to run in? We're discussing this strange but persistent phenomenon on this week's edition of "The Downballot." The latest example is former Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, who's been spending his time in Florida since leaving the House in 2015, but he's not the only one. Republican Senate hopefuls in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Montana, and Wisconsin all have questionable ties to their home states—a problem that Democrats have gleefully exploited in recent years. (Remember Dr. Oz? Of course you do.)

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McCarthy announces formal impeachment inquiry, bypassing House vote

Posted on September 12, 2023 by Laura Clawson

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is calling for a formal impeachment inquiry targeting President Joe Biden, despite the total lack of evidence of wrongdoing turned up by months of Republican investigations. The plan all along was to justify an impeachment inquiry, and when they failed to justify it, they decided to pretend they had, and to go ahead anyway. In a statement on Tuesday, McCarthy repeated allegations regarding Biden’s son’s business dealings, which Republicans have failed to connect to the president himself. He also alleged that Biden’s family has gotten “special treatment by Biden’s own administration.” This would be true only if McCarthy meant that Biden has bent over backward to enable investigations of his son to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest.

“These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction, and corruption, and they warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives,” McCarthy said. “That’s why today I am directing our House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.” Again, months of investigation by these very same House committees has not turned up any evidence.

Notably, McCarthy had previously pledged that an impeachment inquiry would happen only if the House voted for one, a pledge he’s abandoning now, under pressure from the far right of his conference.

Kevin McCarthy: "That’s why today I am directing our House Committees to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden." So not putting this up for a vote in the House. He doesn't take any questions after his brief statement pic.twitter.com/AJg7lLJiyJ
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) September 12, 2023

McCarthy’s announcement came after Punchbowl reported that in a closed-door Republican meeting this week, McCarthy would tell his members that an impeachment inquiry is the “logical next step.” If by "logical" McCarthy means "we've intended to do it all along, and we're just following the plan," then sure. House Republicans are not letting the fact that their months of investigations have turned up no evidence of wrongdoing by the president get in the way of their long-standing plans. Because make no mistake, those months of Republican investigations haven’t found anything on the president other than that he loves his son. No bank records showing illicit payments, no witness testimony that he was involved in his son’s business—nothing.

But McCarthy is under pressure—and not just from Rep. Matt Gaetz, whose efforts to threaten McCarthy’s job are not gaining much traction. While the biggest showboaters of his caucus are pressing for impeachment, McCarthy has to find a way to keep the government open by negotiating a continuing resolution—something the Freedom Caucus has said it will go along with only if there are massive funding cuts. This isn’t just a matter of poor timing. As Rep. Ken Buck, an impeachment skeptic, told MSNBC's Jen Psaki, “So you take those things put together, and Kevin McCarthy, the speaker, has made promises on each of those issues to different groups. And now it is all coming due at the same time.”

McCarthy is weak. That’s been clear since before it took him 15 ballots to get his hands on the speaker’s gavel, and that process made him even weaker since he had to make so many promises to so many different groups.

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The fact that we’re even talking about impeachment is ridiculous, though. Republicans have looked and looked for anything the president did wrong. They have gotten 12,000 pages of subpoenaed bank records and more than 2,000 pages of suspicious activity reports. They’ve interviewed multiple witnesses, and they have found nothing. They have dabbled in revenge porn, publicly showing nude photos of the president’s son. They have had Fox News insinuate that they had proof of things they did not have. House Oversight Chair James Comer has shamelessly lied about what his own committee’s investigations have shown.

And while a few Republicans, like Buck or Rep. Don Bacon, are expressing concern about their party’s rush to impeach without evidence, many others are lining up to help make the (fraudulent) case that an impeachment inquiry is warranted. On Monday, Rep. Nancy Mace—a Republican who occasionally tries to appear independent and reasonable in a very media-friendly way—expressed her support for an impeachment inquiry in the absence of any evidence that impeachment is warranted. Because, she said, maybe the inquiry would find evidence that months of investigation hadn’t—an argument we can expect to crop up often as Republicans positioned ideologically between Bacon and Gaetz look for excuses to fall in line.

“The people deserve the truth and nothing but the truth,” Mace said, hilariously.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins responded, “Isn’t it supposed to be the evidence that leads you to pursue impeachment, an impeachment inquiry?”

“Well, that’s what the inquiry is for,” Mace said, “is to get more evidence.” As if it were the normal course of events to attempt to impeach a president before you had evidence that it was warranted.

But there have already been investigations, Collins replied. “I think that’s where people are confused, because it's not like there’s no investigations.”

“We don’t have Joe Biden’s bank records yet,” Mace replied. “And so one way to do that, my understanding, would be through an impeachment inquiry. So if that’s what gets us those bank records, then I’m going to support it.”

Collins: Isn’t it supposed to be the evidence that leads you to pursue an impeachment inquiry? Mace: That's what the inquiry is for, to get more evidence. pic.twitter.com/e2ETP3gW7g
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 12, 2023

Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel was a little more blunt, saying McCarthy's support for impeachment was welcome because "[o]ur voters are sick and tired of Republicans getting attacked all the time through the courts, through whatever, and it's time to go after Biden."

This week marks a new stage in the House Republican drive toward impeachment. This stage surely won’t bring any more facts supporting an impeachment inquiry. It may bring the country closer to a government shutdown as Republicans put their attention and energy toward lying about the basis for an impeachment inquiry rather than coming up with a continuing resolution. But it’s going to happen because that’s the “logical next step”—not in following the evidence regarding Biden, but in executing Republicans’ long-standing plan to impeach no matter what.

The Senate appears to be uniting against right-wing House extremists

Posted on September 7, 2023 by Joan McCarter

The Senate appears to be uniting against right-wing House extremists, subjecting Speaker Kevin McCarthy to possibly the biggest test to his leadership to date: averting a government shutdown while responding to this year’s catastrophic natural disasters and maintaining assistance to Ukraine. The two top Senate appropriators have an agreement on a spending bill that will come to the floor next week, and Republican leader Mitch McConnell has been using his bully pulpit to keep aid flowing to Ukraine.

Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who together lead the Appropriations Committee, announced Wednesday that they have reached a deal on a spending package that will include funding for Military Construction and Veterans Affairs; Transportation; Housing and Urban Development; Agriculture, Rural Development, and the Food and Drug Administration, as well as agencies under those larger umbrellas.

That could be the first of a handful of “minibus” bills the Senate pushes in the next few weeks, Sen. Jon Tester told Politico on Tuesday. If the Senate shows a united front on passing these funding bills, it would significantly increase pressure on McCarthy to pass a stopgap funding bill and avoid a government shutdown. That’s not a sure thing: The Senate is famously slow when it comes to legislating. To get these bills considered quickly, they’ll have to be advanced by unanimous consent. That avoids the lengthy process of cloture votes and hours of debate time. Any single senator—like the infamously obstructionist Republican Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, for example—could derail that with a simple objection.

So far, however, there hasn’t been much in the way of government-shutdown cheerleading from the usual subjects in the Republican Senate conference. In fact, as Murray and Collins noted in their announcement that “we worked with our colleagues in a bipartisan way to draft and pass out of Committee all twelve appropriations bills for the first time in years—and did so with overwhelming bipartisan votes.” There appears to be little appetite among Senate Republicans for picking this particular fight.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is intent on keeping the conference united on this one. Last week, he reiterated that the Republicans in the Senate were not going to emulate the House and renege on the budget deal that McCarthy struck with President Joe Biden earlier this year to resolve the debt-ceiling standoff. “The House then turned around and passed spending levels that were below that level,” McConnell said. “Without stating an opinion about that, that’s not going to be replicated in the Senate.”

McConnell has also set down a marker on continuing funding for Ukraine, another factor in a potential deal to avert a shutdown. The administration’s request for supplemental funding to Ukraine will likely be attached to a short-term funding bill, as would its request for emergency disaster relief. Funding for disaster relief should be a no-brainer for Republicans politically, as well as a top priority. Tying it to Ukraine assistance and keeping the government open should keep a healthy majority on board.

McConnell is doing his bit to keep up the drum beat. He has spent the last two days hammering on the need to keep funding flowing to Ukraine. “It is certainly not the time to go wobbly,” he said in a floor speech Wednesday. “It is not the time to ease up."

McConnell from Senate floor on more Ukraine aid:“Helping Ukraine retake its territory means weakening 1 of America’s biggest strategic adversaries w/o firing a shot & deterring another one in the process. It means investing directly in American strength,both military & economic." pic.twitter.com/7Z19j3HORs
— Craig Caplan (@CraigCaplan) September 6, 2023

The stakes are high for McConnell. He wants Republicans to regain the majority in 2024, and avoiding a government shutdown is vital to that goal. He’s walking the usual tightrope between keeping the increasingly MAGA-like base happy, while not giving Democrats any additional fodder to hammer Republican opponents.

That’s nothing compared with what McCarthy faces, however. For him, the outcome is more politically existential: whether he keeps his speakership. He’s getting pressure from his supposed ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who won’t vote for any government funding, or support for Ukraine, or really anything until she gets an impeachment inquiry, as she recently detailed in a long, unhinged tweet thread.

McCarthy’s more vocal adversaries are taking direct aim at his speakership. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz threatened a challenge in a tweet Tuesday, writing, “We’ve got to seize the initiative. That means forcing votes on impeachment. And if @SpeakerMcCarthy stands in our way, he may not have the job long. Let’s hope he works with us, not against us.”

Texas Rep. Chip Roy, a Freedom Caucus leader, has piled on with a series of tweets, retweets, and replies firing up the MAGA base for a shutdown. That includes retweeting a post exclaiming, “Chip for Speaker!!!”

That’s a direct message to McCarthy that either of them—or anyone else in the extremist bunch—would be willing to use the tool they extorted from him in his leadership bid in January: the motion to vacate the chair. That allows any single one of them to bring the equivalent of a no-confidence vote to the floor at any time. It’s not the first time Roy has made this veiled threat.

This is the biggest test for McCarthy’s ability to lead, one that everyone paying attention knew would happen if he didn’t stand up to the extremists at some point. He scraped by in the first test on the debt ceiling by striking a deal with Biden—the deal which the extremists forced him to renege on. He’s facing a choice again: Will he stick with the Trump MAGA minority, or try to protect his slim majority—particularly the “Biden 18,” the freshmen Republicans holding districts Biden won in 2020?

It’s also, of course, a test for those supposed moderates, one they’ve failed before. They have the power to block the minority of extremists, if they’re willing to use it.

Sign and send the petition: Pass a clean funding bill. No GOP hostage taking.

McCarthy's speaker deals come back to haunt him

McCarthy caves to rebels for temporary truce

McCarthy is screwing over swing-district Republicans

It’s the Ukraine Update episode! Kerry interviews Markos to talk about what is happening in Ukraine, what needs to be done, and why the fate of Ukraine is tied to democracy’s fate in 2024.

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House Republican extremists look like they want a government shutdown

Posted on September 5, 2023 by Joan McCarter

We are in September now, which means the government-shutdown stopwatch is ticking. This congressional calendar is even more fraught than usual because there’s just so much that Congress needs to do—and yet, House Republican extremists remain intent on creating chaos. Making matters worse, the House remains on vacation this week, and has scheduled only 12 legislative days before the fiscal year ends and government funding expires on Oct. 1.

Government funding isn’t the only thing that’s supposed to be accomplished in the next three weeks. The end of September is also the deadline for the high-stakes farm bill and a reauthorization bill—the legislation that governs how funds are supposed to be spent by agencies—for the Federal Aviation Administration. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is running out of money and needs a cash infusion to keep responding to the recent disasters in Hawaii and Florida, much less what the remainder of hurricane and wildfire season may bring.

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A few weeks ago, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy floated a possible deal with Democrats to pass a short-term funding bill to keep the government running while Congress continues to work on the regular appropriations bills. At least one hard-line Republican, Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, has declared she won’t vote for it unless the House first votes to begin impeaching President Joe Biden.

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas is joining in, not necessarily on impeaching Biden as a condition of funding the government, but more so in opposition to having a functioning government. On Monday, Texas Sen. John Cornyn tweeted about the impending shutdown, obliquely chastising the House Republicans for being “universes” apart from Senate Republicans on funding government. Roy quickly responded by saying that Republicans shouldn’t fund “the things they campaign against - and then just shrug… border… DOJ weaponization… DOD wokeness… IRS abuse… COVID tyranny.”

That’s left McCarthy weakly arguing that if they shut down the government, then they won’t be able to keep investigating Biden. “If we shut down, all of government shuts down — investigation and everything else. It hurts the American public,” he said.

The White House has asked for a short-term continuing resolution, which is the only viable solution at this point to keep the government open. The Senate—Democrats and many Republicans—are on board. So now it all boils down to whether McCarthy will finally buck Republican extremists and work with Democrats on a stopgap bill to extend current levels of funding and likely add additional funding for disaster relief and Ukraine support.

The far-right justices on Wisconsin's Supreme Court just can't handle the fact that liberals now have the majority for the first time in 15 years, so they're in the throes of an ongoing meltdown—and their tears are delicious. On this week's episode of "The Downballot," co-hosts David Nir and David Beard drink up all the schadenfreude they can handle as they puncture conservative claims that their progressive colleagues are "partisan hacks" (try looking in the mirror) or are breaking the law (try reading the state constitution). Elections do indeed have consequences!

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Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is making Kevin McCarthy look really, really pathetic

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Mark Sumner

Confronted by the abundant evidence of former President Donald Trump’s widespread criminality, Republicans have demonstrated consistent outrage … at law enforcement. When they’re not trying to defund the FBI or get rid of the Department of Justice, they’re going after more specific targets.

That has included (but is far from limited to): Rep. Jim Jordan subpoenaing a former member of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office to appear before the House Judiciary Committee for a browbeating, repeated efforts to defund special counsel Jack Smith, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy suggesting a no-evidence-required impeachment of Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Trump supporter threatening to kill federal Judge Tanya Chutkan, and Georgia Republicans trying to defund Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Rep. Andy Biggs even tried to defund the Manhattan DA’s office, which is made only slightly more ridiculous by the fact that Congress provides only a fraction of funds for local prosecutors in the first place.

Really, Republicans have vividly demonstrated that no law, no judge, and no agency means anything to them when it comes to protecting Trump. But when Republicans in both Washington, D.C., and Georgia began planning a means to impeach Willis, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp did something completely unexpected—he defended the Fulton County prosecutor and denounced his fellow Republicans.

As PBS reports, Kemp pulled no punches in saying that efforts to oust Willis for having the gall to indict Trump are just “political theater that only inflames the emotions of the moment.”

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Kemp is no liberal. When he ran for governor in 2018, he had Trump’s ”full and total endorsement,” and Trump praised Kemp for his anti-immigrant, pro-gun positions. But Kemp earned Trump’s ire after the 2020 election when Kemp refused to intervene to prevent certification of Georgia’s election results, despite a call from Trump. Trump went on to attack Kemp on social media, which didn’t stop the governor from easily winning the 2022 Republican primary and being reelected. In the latest elections in the state, candidates endorsed by Kemp easily outperformed those endorsed by Trump.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that much of the Georgia GOP isn’t in Trump’s pocket. Because it is.

As The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, the state party has broken into factions, but Trump still enjoys great support among party officials and state legislators, even as a new poll shows high levels of concern among the state’s Republican voters about Trump’s actions following the 2020 election. In short, Georgia may be the one state where Republican leadership is seriously struggling with the question of whether to free themselves from Trump … though even Kemp has inexplicably suggested he would still vote for Trump in 2024.

Kemp’s willingness to stand up to the members of his party who want to rip up the legal system to defend Trump stands in stark contrast to America’s most spineless man, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Kemp appears to recognize that going after district attorneys just because they are prosecuting someone you support is more than a little problematic. On the other hand, McCarthy is not just failing to stand up to nonsensical demands in the House, but also he’s adding his own.

When Republicans started to worry that a no-investigation impeachment of President Joe Biden might not come off as planned, McCarthy offered up an impeachment of Garland for … whatever.

“I don’t know of a chargeable crime,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told The Hill.

Neither does anyone else. Including McCarthy. The suggestion is just another in a long line of examples of how the barely-speaker is willing to toady to his party’s extremists to keep his fingernail-thin grip on his big office. As Vanity Fair notes, caving to threats from the same extremists who tried to keep him from being elected to begin with is what McCarthy is all about.

As MSNBC puts it, McCarthy might be expected to ignore “oddball bills” and calls to impeach members of the Biden administration. Instead, he has “expressed tacit support” for all these actions, no matter how off the rails. In MSNBC’s words, McCarthy is “taking orders from Mar-a-Lago” and “going along with absurd talking points about … ‘weaponization’ of agencies that haven’t actually been weaponized.”

Kemp is no hero. On many points, his positions are reprehensible. But at least he has enough self-respect to refuse to be the lapdog of extremists willing to sacrifice everything to save Trump. He shows the path that McCarthy might have taken if he actually wanted to lead the House, rather than just follow the worst actions of its worst members.

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Political journalists boost Republican nonsense—and sabotage democracy

Posted on August 28, 2023 by Hunter

Once again, the fundamental crisis in America’s political journalism is an unwillingness to confront corruption—or even to recognize it. Uncritically repeating politically motivated hoaxes is a corrupt act, one that sabotages democracy by depriving citizens of the facts necessary to make democratic decisions.

A new CNN story is indicative of this very problem, so let’s rip it to pieces and see what we can learn. The article is "McCarthy starts to plot Biden impeachment strategy while GOP skeptics remain,” and it is a bog-standard inside look at the politics of the Republican Party’s attempt to further its propagandistic narratives.

The article tells us that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has "privately told" Republicans he plans to begin an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden "by the end of September." And yet, despite setting up an array of committees and subcommittees for Trump's most-loyal toadies to probe Biden and his family, the vengeance squads continue to present only nebulous theories and claims that have already been disproven. This presents McCarthy with a problem.

The article continues:

But leadership recognizes that the entire House Republican conference is not yet sold on the politically risky idea of impeachment. That’s why one of the biggest lingering questions – and something Republicans have been discussing in recent weeks – is whether they would need to hold a floor vote to formally authorize their inquiry, sources say. There is no constitutional requirement that they do so, and Republicans do not currently have the 218 votes needed to open an impeachment inquiry.
Skipping the formal vote, which would be a tough one for many of the party’s more vulnerable and moderate members, would allow Republicans to get the ball rolling on an inquiry while giving leadership more time to convince the rest of the conference to get on board with impeachment.

In other words, with no clear evidence of wrongdoing, House Republicans in swing districts don't want to commit to an impeachment based on the murky say-so of the chamber’s conspiracy cranks. So, to make his deadline, McCarthy plans to simply skip that vote if he must and launch the inquiry anyway.

The issue with this article is not what it covers but how it covers it. All this information is presented as a problem of political gamesmanship. That Republicans have unearthed no actual justification for impeaching Biden is depicted as a political problem, nothing more.

Another factor that could complicate the fall timeline for an impeachment inquiry: Government funding expires at the end of September. McCarthy has already signaled they will need a short-term spending patch to keep the government’s lights on, which hardline conservatives have balked at.
Officially moving ahead with an impeachment inquiry could help keep angry conservatives off McCarthy’s back. And the speaker himself has linked the two issues publicly, warning that a government shutdown could hinder House Republicans’ ability to continue their investigations into the Biden administration – a direct appeal to his right flank, and a sign of all the competing pressures that the speaker is facing.

Every political journalist in Washington, D.C., knows that House Republicans’ push to impeach Biden exists as a strictly partisan maneuver to (1) retaliate against Trump's impeachments and (2) manufacture an anti-Biden scandal so as to offset the accusations of Trump’s rampant criminality. Republicans want to bend the narrative from "Trump and his Republican allies did crimes" to "Both sides are doing crimes." Their intention is to use the false claims to sway the next presidential race. Again.

But we political journalists are going to ignore all that, studiously, and report on the propaganda campaign as a political tactic. What does this mean to Republicans in vulnerable districts? How will it affect short-term spending battles? Can McCarthy thwart would-be Republican moderates to push the propaganda campaign forward?

It's not until paragraph nine that we get the disclaimer: Republicans’ impeachment rationale is bullshit:

Republicans have pointed to unverified allegations that Biden profited from his son’s foreign business dealings as grounds for impeachment and have also alleged that there was political interference at the Department of Justice in the ongoing Hunter Biden criminal case – neither of which Republicans have been able to prove, which the White House and Democrats have repeatedly stressed.

“Unverified” is the key word, but the paragraph ends with a deflection to "White House and Democrats" who insist on pointing out that Republicans have not been "able to prove" their claims—a deflection that is unnecessary and borders on manipulative. CNN knows these claims are unverified, that Republicans have been unable to prove their accusations, and yet the grounds for this impeachment inquiry gets a passing mention deep in the story.

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Most of the claims surrounding Hunter Biden are the product of a Trump-era ratfucking operation by Rudy Giuliani, the now-indicted former mayor of New York City. The operation’s goal was to deflect from Russian election interference with a bizarre theory that, actually, it was Russia’s enemy Ukraine that meddled in our elections and that Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton, and the Hamburglar were all somehow involved. Republicans’ investigations of the “Hunter Biden” story isn't a case of longstanding suspicions of a Biden crime ring being dutifully probed by public servants; it is a conspiracy-peddling campaign pushed by known liars, several of whom are facing charges for their own roles in an attempted coup.

Republicans’ conspiracy mongering is the far more interesting and important story, and political journalism so often seems uninterested in telling it. It is as if these journalists cannot comprehend conspiracy-peddling as corruption. Surely, by writing such articles, they would invite retaliation from elected officials whom the journalists court for access. Better to have access to those telling lies than to point out the lies.

The article closes out by calling attention to a new social media post by the man at the center of all this. On Truth Social, Trump screeched his frustration at, of all people, his allies in Congress: "You don’t need a long INQUIRY to prove it, it’s already proven. … Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US!"

That is what the article should have focused on: the indicted leader of an attempted coup demanding the impeachment of the man who beat him, all while the indicted leader himself mounts a new bid to retake power. It is the story of one political party mired in corruption and peddling hoaxes. It is the most exciting political story on the planet, the story that happens in nations just before democracy falls and a strongman and his toadies declare elections to be too corrupt to continue and journalists to be enemies of the citizens. It is the last political story a democracy tells, and the political journalists tasked with fetching quotes from the conspirators still avoid telling it.

Republicans consider a novel way to obstruct investigations of Trump

Republicans' star witness contradicts Republican claims

Republicans erupt in outrage after AG Garland appoints the special counsel they demanded

We talk about the upcoming Republican presidential debate and how sad a situation it is. The Republican Party shot itself in the foot with a Trump-sized bullet and now it's stuck with him for the foreseeable future. We still try to game out the possible paths the Republican field might take in order to rid themselves of the Donald.

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Fox News says House GOP says it has proof of Biden corruption

Posted on August 9, 2023 by Laura Clawson

House Republicans remain in a frenzy of insinuations, half-truths, and outright lies about President Joe Biden’s connection to his son Hunter’s business dealings, and Fox News is, as always, there on the spot to promote the claims. This is all part of the Republicans’ push to impeach the president even though they have turned up no evidence that he has engaged in wrongdoing. Impeachment has been the plan all along, and the strategic distraction is doubly urgent now that Donald Trump is facing so many federal criminal charges.

Let’s take a look at how Fox News uses smoke and mirrors to make it sound like the Bidens’ accusers have far more evidence than they do. Here’s the latest bombshell report from the “news” network. (Unless otherwise indicated, the quotes come from various Fox News personalities.)

“A new set of bank records linked to the Bidens ...” Linked? How are they linked? To the Bidens? Which Bidens?

“Those who contributed to Hunter’s ventures were then seemingly rewarded with access to his father.” Seemingly? The Fox News chyron here reads, “GOP says it has proof of $20M sent to Bidens,” but then we get “seemingly.” Hmm.

“All that flies in the face, Dana, of what the president and his staff have been saying on repeat.” No it doesn’t, unless you have more than “linked to” Bidens other than Joe and “seemingly.” So far, more than 45 seconds into the clip, we have absolutely no solid information, just insinuation.

“The question is, what was Hunter Biden doing to earn access to this money.” Asked and answered, guys: He had the last name Biden and the ability to create what his business partner Devon Archer testified to the House was the “illusion” of access, putting his father on speaker phone when he was with business associates but not talking about business. It’s not laudatory or inspirational, but it is what it is, and it is not Joe Biden being involved in corruption in any way.

“Republicans on the House Oversight Committee say the new records detail a pay-to-play scheme, proof of $20 million sent to the Bidens from foreign business sources.” Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have said a lot of things, many of them verifiably false. They are claiming here to have evidence of the pay, but what’s the play that’s being paid for? And again, “the Bidens” is not the president—if they thought they had him here, they’d be saying it.

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“The committee says Russian, Ukrainian, and Kazakh oligarchs funneled money to companies tied to Hunter Biden. A Russian billionaire sent $3.5 million to a shell company associated with Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer.” Whoa, whoa, whoa, we’ve gone from $20 million to the Bidens to money going to companies “tied to” Hunter Biden in the sense that they are “associated with” Devon Archer? That’s a flimsy connection to Hunter, let alone his father.

“Then-Vice President Biden dined with the billionaire in Washington.” According to Archer’s testimony, Joe Biden attended two dinners, one in 2014 and one in 2015, that included some of Hunter’s business associates. “I believe the first one was, like, a birthday dinner, and then the second was ‑‑ I think we were supposed to talk about the World Food Programme,” Archer said. So over the course of more than a year, Joe Biden went to a birthday dinner for his son and another dinner to talk about the World Food Programme, and did not control the guest list at either dinner. Got it.

“Another example has Ukrainian money going to Archer and Hunter Biden. Later, Burisma put Hunter Biden on the board.” 1.) Does money that went to Archer count in the previously mentioned $20 million to “the Bidens?” 2.) I think it’s well established that Hunter Biden was on the board of energy company Burisma. We all know that because of Trump’s efforts to extort Ukraine into a sham investigation of Joe Biden and because of Trump’s resulting impeachment.

Next we see House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer alleging that, “The process involved a foreign country or foreign national wiring money to a fake company. Then the fake company would then turn around and wire the money to the Biden family members. They did this to hide the source of the revenue because they weren’t supposed to get money from many of these countries.”

“Republicans are trying to draw a line from these payments to the president,” the Fox News guy chimed in. Republicans have been investigating this for the better part of a year and they are still trying to draw a line, any line, to the president.

Now to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy: “This isn’t about Hunter Biden. This is about paying to play for the Biden family. Because the money goes to nine different members, through shell companies, much like the informant said.” So, again, not Joe? It’s not about Hunter Biden, McCarthy says, but he apparently doesn’t feel he can make any direct allegations about Joe Biden.

Back to the Fox News talking head: “The committee says a Kazakh oligarch transferred $142,000 to Hunter Biden for a sports car. Democrats contend there’s no wrongdoing by the president.” Look, I think we can agree that Hunter Biden’s business dealings have sucked. But once again Fox News used a denial of wrongdoing by the president to substitute for any direct allegation that the president engaged in wrongdoing. “The son did this not-great thing. The father denied wrongdoing on his own part.” How are those things linked, except by a desperate desire to mention the father while lacking any concrete allegation to make against him?

“Some Republicans talk impeachment. The GOP says this is just not pay to play but pay to dine, and drive.” Again, what’s the “play” part here? Right now, Republicans have a lot of evidence that Hunter Biden got paid—although even there, they seem to be trying to pin money on Hunter that really went to Devon Archer. They don’t have any evidence that anyone got anything in exchange for their money. They got to hear Joe Biden’s voice on a speaker phone not talking about business, or see him at his son’s birthday dinner. Republicans have claimed that Hunter got Joe to push for the ouster of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin because he was investigating Burisma—but the reality is that Shokin was not actively investigating Burisma at the time he was forced out, and Joe Biden was one of a chorus of world leaders involved in a concerted effort to get rid of a corrupt prosecutor. So the closest thing to a concrete claim of Joe Biden being on the “play” end of a “pay to play” scheme with his son turns out to be false on multiple grounds.

If Republicans had anything on Joe Biden, we’d know about it. They don’t. And, as Marcy Wheeler points out, all of this screaming about $20 million to Hunter and his business associates is happening when we know that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner parlayed his time as a White House adviser into $2 billion from Saudi Arabia. Jared had an official White House role. Hunter never has. Jared delivered for Saudi Arabia from his White House perch. Hunter has never been in a position to do that for his benefactors and there’s no evidence his father did it for him. Jared got $2 billion. Hunter got some unknown slice of $20 million.

Republicans were desperate to impeach President Biden before they ever took control of the House, but their desperation has increased as Trump’s legal jeopardy has become more apparent. They’re looking to impeach Biden in part so they can claim that Trump’s prosecution on dozens of federal criminal charges is some kind of flimsy distraction. In reality, of course, they are the ones trying to cook up a distraction.

Go ahead and impeach Biden, House Republicans. See you in 2024

Posted on July 27, 2023 by Kerry Eleveld

Earlier this week, Fox News congressional correspondent Chad Pergram sent out a short thread of illuminating tweets framed as a "User’s Manual To Where We Stand With Possible 'Impeachments' in the House."

It was indeed helpful, since House Republicans are currently plotting several of them. Pergram’s thread noted that the push to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over something nebulous was “furthest along,” according to a senior House Republican source. "Although that doesn’t mean that it’s THAT far along," Pergram added. In other words, it's not like the GOP caucus has nailed down real evidence in support of actionable wrongdoing yet.

But House Republicans are also weighing impeaching Attorney General Merrick Garland or maybe even President Joe Biden, after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy signaled an openness to it in a Fox News interview on Monday night. McCarthy's public flirtation with the topic was framed to Pergram by a Republican source as "high-level 'trial balloons.'"

"The reason is that McCarthy wants to get a sense of what GOPers want to do," Pergram explained. "And most importantly, where the votes may lie for impeaching anyone."

Anyone? Biden, Garland, Mayorkas—who knows? Maybe they should flip a coin; play rock, paper, scissors; or get out the Magic 8 Ball.

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Back in the day, lawmakers used to investigate these things first, but that's so last Congress. Today’s House Republicans just move on to the vote-counting and figure they'll hash out a rationale later.

Anyhow, the caucus must have been hot on targeting the president because by Tuesday, McCarthy was reportedly "moving closer" to opening an impeachment inquiry.

On the one hand, Republicans say they're "sitting on" loads of evidence. On the other hand, they are justifying an inquiry as a way to obtain information they've been blocked from getting. Which is it, geniuses? Pick a lane.

At least some Republicans are trying to pump the brakes on playing a completely absurd impeachment card as the country gears up for the 2024 presidential cycle.

“It’s a good idea to go to the inquiry stage,” former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Washington Post. But he cautioned that “impeachment itself is a terrible idea.”

Gingrich, who helped lead the impeachment crusade against President Bill Clinton in 1998, stepped down immediately after the Republican House suffered huge losses in the midterm elections.

Still, Gingrich was essentially clearing the way for McCarthy to appease the Republican extremists who own his speaker’s gavel while cautioning him against an actual impeachment proceeding. Gingrich knows a thing or two about impeachment fallout.

Meanwhile, several House Republicans beelined to reporters to downplay McCarthy's escalation. The Biden White House happily highlighted the discord within the GOP caucus in a statement to The Hill.

Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado called McCarthy's tactics "impeachment theater."
Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina told reporters, "no one is seriously talking about impeachment."
Rep. Tony Gonzalez of Texas offered that voters in his district are concerned about "real issues," like inflation (which is actually dropping) and the border (where crossings have actually plummeted).

“The American people want their leaders in Congress to spend their time working with the President on important issues like continuing to lower costs, create good-paying jobs, and strengthen health care,” said the White House statement, calling Republican machinations "baseless stunts."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also weighed in Wednesday, calling impeachment "not good for the country" while also drawing a false equivalency between House Republicans and the two Democratic impeachments of Donald Trump.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says he's not surprised some House Republicans are proposing an impeachment inquiry of Biden, “having been treated the way they were.” “I think this is not good for the country to have repeated impeachment problems,” McConnell adds. pic.twitter.com/rhKbL8xq0U
— The Recount (@therecount) July 26, 2023

Those impeachment proceedings involved tangible evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually put off impeachment for as long as humanly possible because she knew it would be a divisive proceeding that could blow up in Democrats' faces. Her hand was finally forced in September 2019 by the whistleblower account of Trump's attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And then Trump actually plotted a blood-thirsty coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, to disrupt certification of the 2020 election and end the peaceful transfer of power. So that was that.

But keep this in mind: Both of Trump's impeachments were rooted in hard evidence—like the transcript of Trump's 'perfect phone call' with Zelenskyy, while the Jan. 6 insurrection played out live on TV screens across the country. The horror of that day and Trump's role in it was then vividly recreated by the Jan. 6 committee, arguably the most theatrically effective congressional investigation in decades. In fact, without the Jan. 6 hearings, special counsel Jack Smith likely wouldn't be preparing to drop a criminal indictment on the matter any day now.

In stark contrast to Pelosi’s reticence, House Republicans are still chasing their tails on a mystery scandal with supposed mounds of evidence—if only they had the subpoena power to access it.

As White House spokesperson Ian Sams noted on Tuesday of the House GOP's mystifying predicament, "This is literally nonsensical."

This is literally nonsensical On Hannity last night and in a gaggle today, he said he needs an "impeachment inquiry" to have the power to obtain info Now, McCarthy claims his investigations already "are revealing" info Which is it? Will Capitol reporters press him on this? https://t.co/p3XWGjwLyG
— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) July 25, 2023

Go on with that impeachment, Republicans. The already deluded GOP base will eat it up, but the rest of the country will weigh in at the ballot box next year. See you there.