At some point over the next day or two, the Republican-led House is very likely to hold a vote on whether to authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. It’s not yet certain how the vote will turn out — if four or more GOP members balk at their party’s plan, the measure will fail — but far-right lawmakers are doing their best to twist arms, and there’s evidence to suggest those efforts are working.
It’s less clear why.
To hear Republican members tell it, at the heart of the crusade is a “controversy” from eight years ago. In 2015, the Obama administration, European diplomats, the International Monetary Fund, among other international organizations, leaned on the Ukrainian government to fire a man named Viktor Shokin, who served as the country’s top prosecutor. The Western world — including many congressional Republicans — wanted Shokin’s ouster because he was notoriously lax on investigating corruption.
In his capacity as the sitting vice president, Biden played a prominent role in forcing Kyiv’s hand and getting the Ukrainian government to sack Shokin.
GOP officials now claim the effort was part of some kind of nefarious scheme to help Hunter Biden, which in turn justifies the impeachment push. As Axios reported overnight, the House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry “is predicated on allegations about the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor that have been debunked — under oath — by at least nine government witnesses.”
In other words, the foundation for this obviously foolish endeavor appears to have some dramatic cracks.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is proceeding anyway, apparently indifferent to the fact that his party has uncovered no incriminating evidence against the sitting president, and equally indifferent to the standards he claimed to take seriously just a few years ago. CNN reported:
Just four years ago, Johnson blasted Democrats for opening an impeachment inquiry into Trump largely along party lines less than a…
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