The Republican base has set their sights on impeaching President Joe Biden and also hopes to seize control of the House in November. Keen to avenge the two impeachments by the Democrats of former President Donald J. Trump, who is still the most popular figure in the GOP, a number of high ranked Republicans see it as a top priority for the next year.
Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), in support of the impeachment, stated that he had “… consistently said President Biden should be impeached for intentionally opening our border and making Americans less safe. “Congress has a duty to hold the President accountable for this and any other failures of his Constitutional responsibilities, so a new Republican majority must be prepared to aggressively conduct oversight on day one,” Good added.
The impeachment push from the GOP’s leaders has the support of several rank-and-file conservatives, who have already introduced impeachment articles in the current Congress. The conservatives accuse President Biden of committing “high crimes,” and at least eight resolutions to impeach Biden has already been offered since he took office, said The Hill.
According to media outlets, three resolutions are related to how Biden handled the migrant surge at the southern border. Others target Biden’s management of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and denounce the eviction moratorium that was designed to help renters during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the last one is connected to his son, Hunter Biden, overseas business dealings.
These resolutions might never see the light of day, with Democrats narrowly controlling the lower chamber. With the possibility of Republicans winning the House majority in the midterms, the conservatives want to use their potential new powers to remove a president they deem unfit. Some of them are ready to go as far as to make it the first order of business.
But with the end of this current Congress, those proposals will also expire. As such, some of the sponsors, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who is the lead sponsor of four the impeachment resolutions, are already vowing to revisit these proposals quickly next year. This year, dozens of conservatives have either formally endorsed Biden’s impeachment, or said they’re ready to support it. In an email sent by Nick Dyer, a Greene spokesman, he said “[Greene] believes Joe Biden should have been impeached as soon as he was sworn in, so of course, she wants it to happen as soon as possible.”
To some Republicans, the decision if they will or will not endorse the impeachment next year will be made according to events. One of such Republicans is Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who “has made no decisions yet on supporting impeachment articles next year with Republicans in the majority,” according to spokesman Austin Livingston. Norman, however, had endorsed two impeachment resolutions this cycle related to the Afghanistan withdrawal. Livingston, while referring to the section outlining Congress’s impeachment powers, said Norman “will wait to see what those efforts look like, specifically how they align with Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution.”
