The new aggressive politics in an age of lawfare

Impeaching a president may not have the same power it once did in Washington. But the announcement of an official inquiry today by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is the first time Capitol Hill Republicans have seriously deployed impeachment in a quarter century. Much as Republicans hated Barack Obama, and much as they could have found a path to impeaching him with their large post-Tea Party Congressional majorities, they never went down this path. This is the new aggressive politics in an age of lawfare — but it’s also justified by what we already know, and what we’ve learned in the past year.

“I’m directing our House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden,” McCarthy announced. “This is the logical next step that will give our committees the full power to gather all the facts and answers for the American public.”

From the moment McCarthy became speaker, the plan of action on the potential impeachment of Joe Biden was clear. Instead of a fire and brimstone immediate action, McCarthy outsourced the work of building a case to three chairman allies — James Comer of the Oversight Committee, Jason Smith of Ways and Means and of course Jim Jordan of Judiciary. Rather than some slapdash approach as favored by the likes of Matt Gaetz, who said last September the party should have proceeded to it immediately after the election, these chairmen worked to build a stronger case.

Through subpoenas, bank records, and testimony — some public, some behind the scenes — the Republicans established clear connections between Joe Biden’s official actions as vice president and the work of his son Hunter to shakedown foreign entities, with more than $20 million passed through in payments to nine different Biden family members through a network of more than twenty LLCs set up after the patriarch became vice president.

The Biden-defending media will frame this impeachment as a baseless sop to the right wing of the House. But the truth is that McCarthy and his allies built the case to this point in such a way that even moderate members of the House think it is justified. South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace described what she saw within these records as outlining the “most corrupt scheme in American politics for a sitting vice president.” It’s not just the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world who want to push this forward.

As for the American people, much as the commentariat will pretend (along with the White House) that they find this inquiry laughable, every poll shows otherwise. The latest is CNN/SSRS from just last week, which found 61 percent believe the president was indeed involved in his son’s business dealings, and 55 percent saying he acted inappropriately regarding the investigations into his son. The communications job for Republicans will be to grow the 42 percent who are already convinced he acted illegally, appealing to the 18 percent who say Biden’s actions were unethical, but not illegal.

The Republican plan all along was to get as much as they possibly could out of DoJ, the IRS and the former vice president’s records before kicking off the official impeachment process. Now that DoJ has begun to throw up serious brick walls in the face of investigators, McCarthy and his leadership team believe the time has come to pull the trigger.

In the months ahead, Republicans will prosecute a case against the president that will be impossible for the press to ignore. Much as they will denounce it, the impeachment of a president playing out in tandem as the former president goes before multiple courts facing his own legal challenges will create quite the split screen for American politics. For 2024, it’s lawfare all the way down.