U.S. President Joe Biden addresses union workers at Sheet Metal Workers Local 19 on Sept. 4 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Mark Makela/Getty Images
The impeachment train for U.S. President Joe Biden is running down the track in Washington again – but the energy that is fuelling it is far different from that of the five previous efforts.
Ordinarily, impeachment proceedings begin when a president is accused of a specific crime: the violation of an arcane congressional mandate in the case of Andrew Johnson (1868), several aspects of the Watergate scandal in the case of Richard Nixon (1974), various elements growing out of a sexual relationship with a White House intern in the case of Bill Clinton (1998), and the pressure put on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (2019) and the incitement of the siege of the Capitol (2021) in the case of Donald Trump.
But in this latest possible impeachment inquiry, there is no specific allegation. It might be promoted by charges growing out of the investigation of Hunter Biden, the President’s son, or perhaps a charge linked to opioid deaths attributed to immigration policy at the Mexican border. Or something – anything – else entirely.
The Founding Founders – believing, as Edmund Randolph of Virginia put it, that the president “will have great opportunity of abusing his power” – conceived of impeachment as the ultimate, and ultimately rare, sanction against a rogue national leader. The Constitution specified impeachment for “treason, bribery or other high crimes or misdemeanours.” In 1974, the year impeachment procedures began against Mr. Nixon, Yale professor Thomas Emerson wrote impeachment was “a mode of rededication to constitutional principles without violence.”
The severity of the punishment – essentially an indictment and arraignment in the House of Representatives, followed by a trial in the Senate that could result in the removal of the president – is a forbidding process. Senator William Pitt Fessenden, one of only seven Republicans who voted against the impeachment of Mr. Johnson in 1868, said impeachment should “be exercised in extreme caution” and only in “extreme cases.”
Impeachment is a judicial procedure that shapes those who initiate and participate in it as much as the president who is targeted. The backlash against the Republican effort to impeach Mr. Clinton, for example, led to the Democrats picking up five seats in the House – the first time in two-thirds of a century in which the party holding the presidency gained seats in a midterm election.
The impeachment of Mr. Biden – still more a possibility than a reality, and in any case a futile effort given the Democratic majority in the Senate, where a trial would be held – is as much about politics within the GOP as it is about politics between the Republican-held House and the Democratic President.
Indeed, the tenure of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican representative, may be more in jeopardy in this juncture than is Mr. Biden, for whom no obvious example of “treason, bribery or other high crimes or misdemeanours” is apparent. Even so, Representative Gerald Ford, who later became president after the resignation of Mr. Nixon in the face of certain impeachment and conviction, said in 1970 that “an impeachable offence is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
Mr. McCarthy, who won his speakership on the 15th ballot after making several bargains with far-right Republican legislators is constantly under extreme pressure from that faction, which holds the balance of power in the Republican caucus. One of his few far-right allies in his speakership battle, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, said last week that she would not vote to fund the government “unless we have passed an impeachment inquiry for Joe Biden.”
The fear of a rebellion from the right that would endanger or end his speakership prompted Mr. McCarthy slowly, perhaps reluctantly, to inch toward supporting an impeachment inquiry. Though he knows some Republicans in a chamber with a slim GOP majority might balk at the effort, he has cited the investigation into Hunter Biden and the possible involvement of his father in his business interests as the basis of an impeachment inquiry.
“If you look at all the information we’ve been able to gather so far,” he recently said on Fox News, “it is a natural step forward that you would have to go.”
Mr. Trump, twice burned by his twin impeachments, weighed in on social media, demanding, “Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION,” adding, “THEY DID IT TO US!”
The White House, anticipating such a Republican gambit, already had assembled what is in essence a “war room” to battle any effort to impeach Mr. Biden. With several veterans of Mr. Clinton’s impeachment – he, like all the other presidents impeached, was acquitted in a Senate trial – on board, the team is girding for a public-relations battle to impugn any impeachment effort and a legal battle to defeat any impeachment vote.
The danger is that the public may come to view impeachment as politics by other means, lessening its power and effect for situations when it is truly necessary: “We have entered an era of extreme partisanship where this is unsurprising and pleases the base, especially in the House of Representatives,” said Daniel Urman, a Northeastern University professor with expertise in constitutional law.
“Impeachment has become symbolic rather than a sombre and serious process to remove a president for high crimes and misdemeanours. Whenever the House is controlled by a different party than the president, presidents will need to prepare for impeachment inquiries.”