An impeachment-and-shutdown show will fuel the crisis in US democracy
If it’s Thursday, it must be impeachment. If it’s Saturday, it must be government shutdown. Next week, Republicans in Congress seem determined to prove that US democracy is broken.
The party plans to hold the first hearing on its impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden over his family’s business dealings on 28 September. Meanwhile the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is barreling towards a deadline of 30 September to keep federal agencies running.
The double header indicates how both impeachments and government shutdowns – once seen as rare, dangerous and to be avoided at all costs – have become political weapons deployed with increasing abandon.
“In the past few years we’ve seen the routinisation of the unusual,” said Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington. “It’s terrible for the country. It’s hard enough for a great nation to conduct its affairs without this sort of shortsighted nonsense getting in its way. Government as we know it is grinding to a halt.”
Only three presidents have been impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors” and none were convicted: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998 and Donald Trump in both 2019 and 2021. Now, House Republicans have launched an impeachment inquiry against Biden with no discernible evidence of an impeachable offence.
A House oversight committee hearing on Thursday next week is expected to focus on “constitutional and legal questions” that surround allegations of Biden’s involvement in his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings.
Kevin McCarthy, the House speaker, announced the inquiry last week under pressure from the far right to take action against Biden or risk being ousted from his leadership job. The White House has called the effort “extreme politics at its worst” and an effort to distract from Trump’s upcoming criminal trials.
It is also inextricably linked to McCarthy’s struggles, with a slender 221-212 majority, to pass legislation needed to avoid a federal government shutdown at the end of the month. Some in the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus are brazenly touting a shutdown as a negotiating tactic to cut spending on Ukraine and other areas.
The consequences of a shutdown typically include hundreds of thousands of federal workers not getting paid, national parks closing, and the US’s credit status being put in jeopardy. There were no shutdowns in the first 200 years of US history. There have been six since 1995.
The first two pitched Clinton against Newt Gingrich, a Republican speaker eager to reform Medicare, Medicaid, welfare and dozens of other programmes while also slashing taxes. The next came under Barack Obama in 2013.
There were brief shutdowns under Trump in January 2018 (the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said dealing with him was “like negotiating with Jell-O”) and February 2018 (lasting just five and a half hours). The end of that year brought the longest closure in history – 35 days – over funding for Trump’s border wall.
Republicans regained control of the House in January. Their willingness to embrace the concept for political gain implies that its fear factor has been worn down by repetition. Earlier this year, the party was even willing to flirt with the disaster of defaulting on the national debt before reaching a late compromise.
Charlie Sykes, editor of the Bulwark website and a former conservative radio host based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said: “We’ve dumbed down our crises. Remember when impeachment used to be this cataclysmic thing? Now impeachments are the new censure, and government shutdowns are the new filibuster. There’s a certain numbing effect there.
“On the other hand, it is interesting watching House Republicans moving ahead with this performative impeachment of Joe Biden as they also prepare to shut down the government. This makes it more difficult for them to convince the American electorate to give them more power, to trust them, to be a responsible governing party.”
Sykes added: “This is one of those moments where I think Republicans need to be careful what they wish for, because doing those two things separately might pay some dividends, but doing them together might be a perfect storm of political malpractice.”
The Republican actions could feed growing public discontent with Washington. A report by Pew Research Center on Tuesday found that two in three Americans say they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics, while more than half feel angry. Faith in the government is near a 70-year low with just 16% of the public saying they trust it always or most of the time.
An impeachment-and-shutdown show would appear to fuel the crisis in democracy. But recent years have indicated that democracy also has a way of correcting itself.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “We saw in 2022 elections that the Republicans got badly punished for this kind of behaviour.
“Republicans realise that their majority in the House hangs on maybe a dozen very closely contested seats, and that failing to govern and becoming obsessed with impeaching Joe Biden for no demonstrated reason and then shutting the government down are all reasons for the Republicans [to] continue to lose winnable elections.
“That’s the hope of democracy: that there’s a political and electoral cost to the fanaticism in parts of the Republican party.”