Impeach Biden? Pointless. Let his problems keep drip, drip, dripping
We’re doing the impeachment thing again, huh? This week, House Republicans voted to formalize their nascent impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. That may not be the political masterstroke they seem to believe.
One unusual wrinkle about moving ahead on the eve of an election year is that Biden is, by the standards of a sitting president, pretty darn unpopular right now. Use whatever measuring stick you like — the FiveThirtyEight aggregate of public polling has Biden’s approval rating at 38.2 percent and the RealClearPolitics aggregate has it at 39.9 percent. Biden is losing a lot of matchups with Donald Trump. The swing-state polling looks awfully grim, too.
And yet ... no one seems all that enthused about impeaching Biden. Even the Republican base doesn’t seem all that fired up about it. In October, the Monmouth University national poll found that only 34 percent of registered voters believed Biden should be impeached, and that same survey found nearly 3 in 10 Republicans didn’t think Biden should be impeached. In a Public Policy Polling survey released this week, only 24 percent of voters in districts won by Biden in 2020 but held by Republicans said they would be more likely to support a candidate who backed the impeachment inquiry, while 44 percent of voters said they would be less likely to support a candidate who backed the impeachment inquiry.
You can chalk that up to voters not believing that anything Biden has done rises to the level of impeachment. Or you can chalk it up to trepidation about the words “President Harris.”
It also may reflect that the public knows Democrats have a small majority in the Senate. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) would swat away articles of impeachment so quickly the Washington Wizards might give him a tryout. The lesson of the Clinton and Trump impeachments is that it is extremely difficult to persuade a member of the president’s party to vote to convict the president. Until Trump’s second impeachment, the only person to have done it was Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who did it twice.
As luck would have it, Romney weighed in on the potential impeachment of Biden on Sunday. “Well, if I were in the House, I’d vote against it unless they were able to bring forward evidence that suggested there were a high crime or misdemeanor that had been committed. But so far, that hasn’t been the case.”
If an article of impeachment were to go to the Senate, it would likely be rejected by the chamber’s 48 Democrats and the three independents who caucus with them (Angus King of Maine, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona), and Romney sounds awfully skeptical. The ceiling for impeachment appears to be 48 Republican votes, and even that insufficient total is hardly guaranteed. Removal from office would require two-thirds of the Senate, which is an extremely tall order in the current political environment.
And that feels like a waste of the Senate’s time and energy, particularly as a presidential election year approaches. (As of Tuesday, we’re 329 days, or less than 11 months, from Election Day.) That, I suspect, is one other reason there’s no burgeoning appetite for impeachment, even as Biden remains unpopular. Americans like having the final say on how a president is doing and whether they should remain in office.
It isn’t that the complicated series of payments to Biden’s family members — certain to figure prominently in the articles of impeachment — doesn’t stink. It does. Only a Democrat could believe that it’s completely normal and above board for foreign companies to pay more than $10 million to so many Biden family members for unspecified services while he was vice president.
But this is the sort of matter that is best to left to voters to evaluate. Let them make the call. A steady drip, drip, drip of new information about these payments is likely to be much more harmful to Biden’s chances of a second term than yet another impeachment effort that breaks down along partisan lines.