Poll shows how misguided House Republicans are about a government shutdown

Posted on September 15, 2023 by Kerry Eleveld

Fresh off their crackerjack idea of launching an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, House Republicans are greasing the skids for a government shutdown. In their view, it's both righteous and popular. Not kidding.

“We’re going to have a shutdown, it’s just a matter of how long,” Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina said Thursday. “We believe in what we are doing. The jury will be the country. And the jury is fed up with reckless spending.”

On Friday, the progressive consortium Navigator Research released fresh polling on voters' views of a government shutdown and the government's spending priorities.

Seventy-seven percent of voters believe a government shutdown this fall would hurt the economy either a lot (45%) or somewhat (32%). A measly 13% of voters said it would not hurt the economy.

🚨 NEW POLL: 77% of Americans believe a government shutdown this fall would hurt the economy, including… 🔵 84% of Democrats 🟢 74% of independents 🔴 71% of Republicans … as well as 83% of those who rate the economy negatively, but support Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. pic.twitter.com/8FLPOMJtIn
— Navigator Research (@NavigatorSurvey) September 15, 2023

And while Republicans think shutting down the government in an attempt to slash spending is a righteous cause, the spending cuts they are proposing are deeply unpopular.

At least 3 in 4 voters oppose cuts to the following: Social Security, nutrition assistance for children and vulnerable families, K-12 education, funding to provide safe and clean drinking water, and investments in life-saving medical research for children, cancer patients, and maternal health.

Bottom line: The more righteous House Republicans feel about their shutdown and their rationale for it, the better it is for Democrats. No one wants a shutdown but House Republicans, and they seem more than happy to own it.

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

Kerry talks with Drew Linzer, director of the online polling company Civiqs. Drew tells us what the polls say about voters’ feelings toward President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and what the results would be if the two men were to, say … run against each other for president in 2024. Oh yeah, Drew polled to find out who thinks Donald Trump is guilty of the crimes he’s been indicted for, and whether or not he should see the inside of a jail cell.

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The New York Times gives impeachment the both-sides treatment

Posted on September 14, 2023 by Laura Clawson

House Republicans are engaging in a completely partisan, evidence-free impeachment inquiry—but Peter Baker of The New York Times wants to talk about how the White House is treating this as a political issue. And just to get this out of the way right off the bat, the paragraph count before Baker acknowledges that Republicans have no evidence against Biden is seven.

In paragraph eight, he gets around to, “The Republican investigation so far has not produced concrete evidence of a crime by the president, as even some Republicans have conceded.” Even there, the implication is that the Republican investigation has produced some evidence, and they just need to make it concrete. In reality, the Republican investigation has produced no evidence that the president has engaged in any misconduct, let alone a crime.

Before the reader gets to that halfhearted admission, though, they’ve had to plow through a great deal of fretting about how the White House is treating this as political:

Forget the weighty legal arguments over the meaning of high crimes and misdemeanors or the constitutional history of the removal process. Mr. Biden’s defense team has chosen to take on the Republican threat by convincing Americans that it is nothing more than base partisanship driven by a radical opposition.

How exactly would Baker propose the White House make weighty legal arguments when there is no legal case against Biden? When after months of fruitless investigations into Biden, Republicans have simply decided to go ahead with claiming to have found the things they looked for and didn’t find? What would he have the White House or any other Democrats do in response?

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At one point, Baker quotes Julian Epstein, a Clinton-era lawyer for the Democrats of the House Judiciary Committee. “Overall, this has not been handled well by the White House,” Epstein argued. “The team there has violated the cardinal sin of investigations — allowing new information to trickle out continuously and while being stuck in stale Baghdad Bob-like ‘no evidence’ denials.” But if the White House hadn’t allowed new information to come out organically, the Peter Bakers of the world would have said that Biden was suppressing evidence! And how is the White House supposed to characterize the lack of evidence other than to point out that lack?

As always, Democrats are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If Democrats were to cede the political fight and allow Republicans to beat the crap out of Biden while the Democratic Party was busy making “weighty legal arguments over the meaning of high crimes and misdemeanors or the constitutional history of the removal process,” it might satisfy Baker for a minute, but it would be a disastrous course of action. As it is, through sheer repetition and relying on lousy media coverage that doesn’t call a lie a lie, Republicans have convinced a substantial fraction of the public that there must be a there there when it comes to Biden and corruption. Imagine if Democrats voluntarily disarmed.

As entries in the Peter Baker oeuvre go, this one is pretty pedestrian and uninspired, nowhere near as creative as the time he wondered at length if it was a problem for Biden that Donald Trump was getting all the attention by being indicted. You didn’t have to be The New York Times Pitchbot to know that the Times would respond to the White House documenting Republican lies about the basis for impeachment and calling on the media to cover it better by fretting about the White House violating norms. As tired and predictable as it is, though, it’s still harmful to have the Times pretending there’s equivalence between a fraudulent impeachment inquiry and attempts to push back on such an inquiry by pointing out that it is fraudulent.

If it feels more like a political campaign than a serious legal proceeding, that is because at this point it is, at least as the White House sees it and would like others to. In the first 24 hours of their inquiry, the House Republicans made no new requests for documents, issued no new subpoenas, demanded no new testimony and laid out no potential articles of impeachment. Instead, they went to the cameras to call Mr. Biden a liar and a crook, so Mr. Biden’s defenders went to the cameras to return fire.

Note the structure here: The White House wants people to see it as political. There’s strong evidence that it is, yet it is always the White House’s pushback efforts that lead Baker’s coverage, as if they came first. Reality is the reverse.

Chris Christie says he’s going to ‘find’ and ‘confront’ Trump. Good luck with that, buddy

Posted on September 13, 2023 by Hunter

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie wasn't able to confront his rival presidential candidate, Donald Trump, during the first Republican debate since Trump decided he was too busy being indicted to show up. However, Christie has a plan for how to get his confrontation anyway.

"You think I'm gonna have a hard time finding Donald Trump?” Christie boasted on Tuesday. “You think that over the course of the next couple months I'm not gonna find him and confront him someplace?"

It's a terrible plan if you can even call it one, and it ain't gonna work, but Christie gets to do his tough-guy schtick and maybe egg Trump into angry-posting a bit. And there's an obvious flaw with this “plan”: Trump remains a lifelong coward. He simply doesn't show up where he might be confronted. He holds events at his own resorts, events where you have to pay to set foot on the grounds and where private security and Secret Service agents do not mess around with people who try to sneak in to "confront" a former president. And his rallies are set up with the most loyal of allies and paid for by state Republican parties so that his own campaign doesn't have to pay a dime.

Those Republican Party organizers are not going to let Christie into an event so that he can heckle guest Donald Trump, because that would put them on Trump's enemies list forever. So what's Christie going to do? Is he going to do the classic fake-mustache trick? Disguise himself as a caterer?

Honestly, if Christie really wants to confront Trump, his most likely move would be to simply insult Trump so much and so often as to drive Trump past his usual short-thumbed frenzies on Truth Social and into actually showing up to debate. Christie's whole motivation for running for president appears to be as a foil for Trump, so to Christie, manifesting instances where he can insult Trump to his face might be a campaign-existential goal.

Sign the petition: Denounce MAGA GOP's baseless impeachment inquiry against Biden.

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Impeachment inquiry null and void without House vote, confirmed by Trump’s DOJ

Posted on September 13, 2023 by Hunter

There's been a bit of fuss made over this, but it's important to put it in context so that's what we'll do. Yes, it's absolutely true: According to a binding opinion issued by the Justice Department, House impeachment inquiries are invalid unless the House votes to authorize them, meaning the Biden administration can take whatever subpoenas come from House Republicans in the next few weeks and summarily trash them. Sorry, none of it counts! Come back when you've taken a vote, Kevin.

That binding opinion was issued by Donald J. Trump's gloriously crooked Justice Department, and specifically by DOJ Office of Legal Counsel head Steven Engel. It was one of the many Trump administration efforts to dodge House subpoenas during the impeachment investigation that stemmed from Trump's move to block military aid to Ukraine until the Ukrainian president agreed to announce a sham investigation of Trump’s political opponents, including President Joe Biden. It came after Trump's team tried a great many other dodgy things to cover up Trump's extortion attempt, such as improperly classifying the phone call in which Trump did it, but technically, it's still on the books and Justice is currently obliged to tell Reps. James Comer, Jim Jordan, and the others to pound sand.

But, you know, legally pound sand. This would be the kind of invitation to pound sand that comes under a really nice letterhead, one that greatly details how the sand should be pounded and why, with a big ol' signature or two at the end of it. You can't tell me they're not selling raffle tickets inside Justice right now to decide who gets to put their name on that letter. Here’s a suggestion: Consider using a glitter pen.

Aside from its sublime trolling opportunities, however, this isn't a particularly useful little tidbit. House Republicans who once thought OLC opinions to be sacrosanct when they were written to protect Dear Leader's constant crookery will now declare the same legal stances to be communism if a not-Republican tries to follow them. Nobody among House Republicans gives a damn what their own supposed deeply held principles were a few years back, and a party that both attempted and is still conspiring to block investigations of an attempted coup really, really does not give a damn about what the lawyers have to say.

Remember, Jordan himself gleefully defied the authorized subpoenas of his own Congress demanding he testify about his role in Jan. 6, 2021. Nobody has ever claimed the former wrestling coach cares about what's legal and what's not, and nobody ever will. These are seditionists, not scholars.

A Biden administration attempt to troll Republicans with Engel's own binding legal opinion is also easily worked around, in theory. After launching the initial impeachment probe into Trump without a full House vote in 2019, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi brought the matter to the House floor and got official authorization about five weeks later, on Oct. 31. It wasn't until the following January that a stonewalling Trump administration announced that they still didn't have to respond to any subpoenas issued before that vote because they weren't "authorized," and that's the stance they and Senate Republicans went into Trump's first impeachment trial with.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy could, in theory, set up a similar authorization vote whenever he wants. He's not doing that right now, because Republicans in non-hard-right districts do not want to take that vote and do not think they can win reelection after supporting an impeachment premised solely on the party’s revenge fantasies, so impeachment backers simply don't have the votes. But it's possible McCarthy could somehow develop actual leadership skills at some point, coming up with a trade that would goad them into it.

In the end, though, none of this particularly matters because House Republicans—and specifically the coup supporters in the caucus—don't have any "evidence" they want or need to find to begin with. The impeachment probe was announced after House Republicans pursued the same conspiracy theories pushed by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to discredit the Ukrainian government and give Trump possible blackmail fodder that would help him win reelection. Republican investigators found not one damn thing, because there was nothing to find to begin with. Republicans can issue subpoenas as an extended fishing expedition, looking for any unreturned library books or unpaid parking tickets that they can spin into new frothing theories, but an "impeachment inquiry" so brazenly premised on retaliation rather than evidence will struggle to even define what information they're supposedly demanding.

None of this matters, in other words. It's political theater, and all the House coup-backers care about is that they can keep it alive, Giuliani-style, long enough to benefit indicted seditious crapsack Trump in his bid to win back power. Republicans need to claim Biden is corrupt precisely because Trump has been indicted in four separate venues. The evidence against Trump is so clear in each case that Trump could well be found guilty in all four of them, and the only defense House Republicans have for propping up a potential jailbird as president is by claiming that Actually, he's no more crooked than anyone else in Washington, D.C., so you might as well elect the felon you know.

Joe Biden's son claimed to be more of a bigshot than he was. Ooooh, what a scandal. Surely, there's never been a Republican failson to ever be caught doing that.

Sign the petition: Denounce MAGA GOP's baseless impeachment inquiry against Biden

Hot takes pour in after McCarthy announces impeachment inquiry

McCarthy announces formal impeachment inquiry, bypassing House vote

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White House tells media to commit acts of journalism

Posted on September 13, 2023 by Laura Clawson

No media report on the House impeachment inquiry targeting President Joe Biden is complete without prominent coverage of the fact that Republicans have no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden, and are instead basing their drive to impeach on lies. Unfortunately, a lot of media coverage is incomplete in this exact way, leading the White House to send a letter to major media organizations, calling on them to do better at reporting the facts.

“It's time for the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies,” the White House wrote. The memo details how "Covering impeachment as a process story—Republicans say X, but the White House says Y—is a disservice to the American public who relies on the independent press to hold those in power accountable.”

And in the modern media environment, where every day liars and hucksters peddle disinformation and lies everywhere from Facebook to Fox, process stories that fail to unpack the illegitimacy of the claims on which House Republicans are basing all their actions only serve to generate confusion, put false premises in people’s feeds, and obscure the truth.

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That’s the crux of it: If House Republicans can rely on the media to help spread their lies under the guise of neutral reporting, without a full explanation that these claims are false, then people are going to believe things that are not true. The media cannot fully combat the spread of disinformation, of course, and right-wing media organizations like Fox News are more interested in spreading it themselves. But traditional media shouldn’t let itself be used to launder false claims.

Predictably, the right-wing media immediately started stirring up outrage about the White House issuing “marching orders,” as go-to Republican legal expert Jonathan Turley put it. It’s a dynamic we’ve seen repeatedly.

The White House: Hey, guys, could you try to stick to the facts and identify misinformation as such?

Right-wing media: How dare they??? This is oppression.

That outrage is a reflexive response; in this case it’s also intended to distract from the 14-page appendix accompanying the White House letter, which offers thorough debunkings of seven key lies on which Republicans are basing their claims about the need for an impeachment inquiry. For instance, Republicans insist, “Joe Biden ‘engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national.’” But that allegation is based on an FBI document recording an unverified allegation that was initially investigated and dismissed by the Justice Department under Donald Trump.

In short: A claim about something Biden allegedly did before he was president that the Trump Justice Department couldn’t substantiate at a time when Trump was looking for ways to discredit Biden has now become an exhibit in a push to impeach him.

Another of the Republican claims, that "Biden has participated in his family's global business ventures with America's adversaries,” was directly refuted by testimony from two of Hunter Biden’s former business partners—witnesses House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer bragged were going to help him show Biden’s corruption. No such ties have been revealed in the thousands of pages of bank records House Republicans have obtained.

Everything the White House offers there is exhaustively documented, with many of the sources coming from the same media organizations the letter is begging to fairly cover this impeachment inquiry. The facts are widely available, and now they’re neatly summarized in a very transparent 14-page document with lots of links. Reporters and their editors need to use those facts—and not in the eighth paragraph following seven paragraphs of Republicans lying, but right up front, every single time.

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Child poverty skyrocketed last year, thanks to GOP and Joe Manchin

Posted on September 13, 2023 by Hunter

The U.S. Census Bureau says that child poverty in this nation skyrocketed last year. Child poverty rates in 2021 had reached an all-time low of 5.2%. In 2022, however, that number soared to 12.4%.

The reasons child poverty in the United States more than doubled in a single year are not disputed. It’s because of the expiration of the Republican-hated expanded child tax credit and the shift away from providing direct monthly payments to at-risk families.

The Washington Post:

“By far this is the largest annual increase in U.S. history for both children and the overall population in terms of poverty, going back to 1967,” said Zachary Parolin, a senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. “In 2021 we had the lowest child poverty rate on record, largely due to the expansion of the child tax credit. It worked in reducing poverty; it worked in making life better for people. Then it expired, and Congress did not renew it. And now we are seeing the largest increase in child poverty in U.S. history. We are back to around where we were pre-pandemic.”

Also The Washington Post, same story:

Tuesday’s Census release is “a story of what could have been,” said Arloc Sherman, vice president for data analysis and research at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The pandemic showed that we could stand up policies that could help families. These numbers underscore how much poverty is a policy choice.”

So there you go. We discovered a way to slash the number of children in poverty by over half, quick and simple. Then we stopped because Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin demanded we stop. It won’t be enacted again so long as the same pro-coup Republicans are in control of the House and can stop it.

It’s because they don't care. There's no larger story there. We know how to lift children out of poverty. It's cheap and straightforward. But the people huffing and puffing for fossil fuel companies to get better tax treatment and for rich people to always pay less in tax each year than they did the year before do. Not. Care. They’ve never cared. They pride themselves on not caring. They go to church and quote from Bibles and will tell you up, down, and sideways how truly offensive it would be to feed children when the nation’s richest people could instead buy slightly larger private jets.

In a statement, President Joe Biden said, "Today's Census report shows the dire consequences of congressional Republicans' refusal to extend the enhanced Child Tax Credit, even as they advance costly corporate tax cuts. ... The rise reported today in child poverty is no accident—it is the result of a deliberate policy choice congressional Republicans made." That statement ignores Manchin's role in sabotaging the program, but it's true Manchin wouldn't be in that position if there were any Republicans in the Senate who have a flying damn about anything but the lobbyist class.

We can't spoil grade-schoolers by letting them eat, not when there are new defense contracts to be had and oil companies are practically withering away with the expense of having to pay a pittance to drill on public land.

"I will continue to fight to restore the expanded Child Tax Credits to give tens of millions of families the tax relief and breathing room they deserve," said Biden. This is the sort of statement that should make decent people curl up and die, because having to "fight" for a relatively cheap, obviously helpful program makes us sound like a garbage country filled with dirtbags rather than whomever your average flag-waver imagines themselves to be when they're watching Fox News or attending their little Trump rallies.

We could fix this tomorrow if we wanted. A couple of votes and a signature are all it takes. Republicans aren't going to do that, because they don't give a shit. They’d rather impeach Biden in retaliation for their guy getting indicted. They’d rather strip federal funds from those investigating Donald Trump. And then these assholes, almost every one of them, strolls into church on Sunday and claims to be better than everyone else.

We have seen this too many times, and we know exactly how it plays out. The cruelty is the point, and it's always been the point, and it's not going to change anytime soon because the more vicious politicians can be toward poor children, the more the conservative base giggles and waves their cheap imported flags.

Sign the petition: Child poverty has doubled. Bring back the child tax credit

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GOP Congresswoman Lisa McClain explains why she supports impeachment inquiry of Biden

Posted on September 12, 2023 by Amna Nawaz

The House Oversight Committee is one of several on tap to lead the Republican impeachment inquiry into President Biden. Republican Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan sits on that committee and joined Amna Nawaz to discuss her support.

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.

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.