House approves Biden impeachment inquiry as Northwest lawmakers split along party lines

WASHINGTON – The House voted along party lines Wednesday to authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, with all Republicans in favor and every Democrat opposed to the measure, which gives the GOP majority more authority to continue a yearlong investigation that has produced no evidence of the high crimes or misdemeanors for which a president can be impeached.

Northwest Republicans cast the move as a logical next step in a wide-ranging probe that has centered around the president’s son, Hunter Biden, who has been indicted on federal tax charges. The younger Biden has been accused of enriching himself by peddling influence – or at least the appearance of influence – when his father was vice president, but the GOP investigation has failed to prove President Biden having benefited from his son’s business dealings.

“I think it’s important that we move forward and continue to get answers,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Spokane, said in an interview Monday, “and collect the information that we need to get the answers to important questions.”

Democrats dismiss the impeachment inquiry as a fishing expedition and a political ploy meant to suggest an equivalency between Biden and his likely opponent in the 2024 election, former President Donald Trump, who was twice impeached during his presidency and has been indicted in four separate criminal cases since he left the White House.

“It’s terrible, because it’s distracting from us doing actual work that needs to be done,” Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Medina, said Wednesday on MSNBC. “The dysfunction and chaos and extremism we’ve seen from House Republicans has been true since Day One of this Congress. So data, facts, evidence – that doesn’t matter to them. They don’t know how to do anything else right now, so this is what they’re continuing to focus on.”

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has rejected the idea that the president has done anything wrong, highlighting comments from some Senate Republicans who say they haven’t seen the evidence to justify an impeachment inquiry.

Other GOP senators have supported the effort by their House counterparts, which will give Republicans in the lower chamber authority to enforce subpoenas. Wednesday’s vote came just hours after Hunter Biden defied a subpoena from House investigators to appear in a closed-door deposition, offering instead to defend himself in a public hearing.

Hunter Biden, who received millions of dollars from businesses in Ukraine and China for supposed consulting work, was indicted Friday on charges related to failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes on that income. But House Republicans have cast a wider net in search of impeachable offenses.

Rep. Russ Fulcher, R-Idaho, said Biden should be impeached for “refusal to enforce U.S. border law.”

Border Patrol agents caught more than 240,000 migrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in October, according to federal data. The Biden administration has deported a larger share of such migrants than the Trump administration did, according to data from the libertarian Cato Institute, but nearly half of them have been released into the United States with an order to show up for asylum hearings scheduled months or years in the future.

“Forget the Hunter Biden stuff,” Fulcher said in an interview Tuesday. “Maybe that comes to fruition; maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there’s direct links; maybe there’s not – doesn’t matter to me. The biggest, most graphic example of high crimes and misdemeanors is not enforcing our own laws on the southern border.”

Impeachment is a political process, not a legal one, and a simple majority of House Republicans could impeach Biden. But they would almost certainly fall short of the two-thirds of senators needed to convict a president on charges leveled by the House – as happened in the acquittals of then-President Bill Clinton in 1999 and of Trump in both 2020 and 2021.

The Constitution provides that a president can be impeached for “treason, bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” While treason and bribery are clearly defined in federal law, “high crimes and misdemeanors” are not.

Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho Falls, voted to authorize the impeachment inquiry but said he worries about how the process – as well as a recent surge of votes to censure House members – erodes the comity that has let Republicans and Democrats work together.

“It’s becoming too common,” he said Tuesday of impeachment. “And I’m concerned about the censure votes, and on and on and on, you know? We’ve got to get back to doing business and respecting one another and that kind of stuff.”

Rep. Dan Newhouse of Sunnyside, one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, also voted yes on Wednesday but said it doesn’t equate to a vote to impeach Biden.

“The inquiry authorization is a critical step in ensuring Congress has the tools necessary to answer the serious questions raised by the evidence obtained so far,” Newhouse said in a statement. “It is important to note, however, there is no forgone conclusion that the investigations will end with an impeachment charge. Where this leads will be determined by the facts.”