Have the Odds of a Biden Impeachment Changed?
Have the Odds of a Biden Impeachment Changed?
With control of the U.S. House and Senate still up in the air, the question of whether Republicans will seek to impeach President Joe Biden is at once hard to answer and essential to resolve.
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Introduction
With the partisan breakdown of the upcoming 118th Congress still unclear, it is hard to assess which legislative or purely political initiatives will move forward beginning on January 3, 2023.
While Democrats are very likely to hold a 51-49 advantage in the United States Senate on that date—Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) are favored to win their as-yet uncalled races, and without popular Georgia governor Brian Kemp (R) atop the ticket in the December 6 runoff in that state, Raphael Warnock (D-GA) is well-positioned to defeat Republican Herschel Walker by even more than the 1.3% he did on Election Day—the outcome in the House remains unclear, and as this is where any future impeachment of President Joe Biden would occur, it is the primary focus of this Proof report.
Right now the NBC News forecast estimates that the 118th Congress will see a GOP House majority of “220-215”, though—critically—this estimate comes with a “+/- 7” caveat, meaning that the final result could fall anywhere between a Democratic House with a 222-213 majority or a Republican House with a 227-208 majority. Significantly, NBC reports that in the past 24 hours many races have been surprising observers by breaking for Democrats in late vote tranches, meaning that the odds that Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) does not become the new Speaker of the House remain significant.
Still, Republicans are favored to win a narrow majority in the nation’s lower chamber of Congress, especially now that Democrats’ longshot bid to unseat insurrectionist Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) is apparently evaporating.
Even though control of the next Congress has yet to be decided, the race to determine the leadership of the two parties in that Congress has already begun. Both Democrats and Republicans are likely to hold their caucus votes for leadership of the 118th Congress in November, potentially even before key House races in California (which could well determine the balance of power this coming January) have been called. So it’s useful to assess how the likeliest outcome of all of this—that being a Republican majority in the House—would bode for the possible impeachment of President Biden.
First Things First: Who’ll Lead the GOP?
As Americans have seen over and over for years now, the nation’s MAGA enthusiasts are temperamentally disinclined to blame Donald Trump for anything at all—let alone a midterm election debacle in which he wasn’t officially on any state or federal ballot.
That Trump repeatedly inserted himself into the midterms is likely to be ignored. He hand-picked insurrectionists and other notable ne’er-do-wells who lost winnable races—such as Don Bolduc (R-NH) and Mehmet Oz (R-PA), as well as likely losers Adam Laxalt (R-NV), Blake Masters (R-AZ), and the aforementioned Walker—and made his near-certain entrance into the 2024 presidential race a constant topic of conversation in the final weeks of the midterm campaign. He did so, it appears, so he could claim the largest laurel if, as was then anticipated, Republicans manifested a “red wave” that swept them to power in both the House and Senate. That Trump was never willing to accept blame if his game plan went awry was always clear; as many media outlets have since reported, Trump actually said outright that he should “get all the credit” for any Republican wins and “not be blamed” for GOP losses. Per usual, this accountability-free framework was deemed generally acceptable by Mr. Trump’s large MAGA base.
So if Republicans don’t plan to blame Trump for a disappointing Election Day—which at best will see them gain a handful of seats in the House, and at worst (in their view) could result in two more years of total Democratic control of Congress—who will they blame? The answer, it appears, is the aforementioned House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy.
According to this CNN report, insurrectionist and House Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy (R-TX) “told reporters that ‘no one [in the House GOP caucus] currently has 218 votes’ for Speaker, which is the magic number McCarthy would need to secure the speaker’s gavel on the House floor in January. Rep. Roy said he wants McCarthy to list in greater detail his plans for a wide array of investigations into the Biden administration. And Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) complained that McCarthy seemed to backpedal on whether he would be willing to launch impeachment proceedings into President Joe Biden or members of his Cabinet [like Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas].”
Longtime Proof readers will recall that Andy Biggs was one of Donald Trump and Ali Alexander’s three chief co-conspirators in the run-up to the January 6 coup attempt, along with Biggs’ then–fellow House Freedom Caucus members Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Mo Brooks (R-AL), the latter of whom lost his re-election bid at the GOP primary stage after showing insufficient continued loyalty to Trump’s ongoing insurrection.
So McCarthy appears to be in a catch-22: either he commits to a Biden impeachment that’s destined to fail in the Senate and be a black eye for a new GOP House majority (inasmuch as it would make it difficult for that new majority to simultaneously pass legislation to benefit Americans, so busy would it be harassing the president) or else he loses his bid to be Speaker to a House Freedom Caucus member (or HFC endorsee) who gains that role by having simply made a more convincing promise to impeach the president.
It doesn’t take a shrewd observer to notice that both of the options above do lead to an impeachment of President Biden.
There Are Obstacles to a Biden Impeachment, However
If it seems paradoxical to say that a Biden impeachment is at once inevitable and also impossible, it’s nevertheless so.
There are reasons an impeachment might not happen even when or as a promise to impeach Biden—over what is unclear, but likely an amalgam of constitutionally and legal unactionable partisan dissatisfaction over his handling of the southern border, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Chinese spying in the United States, or his son Hunter’s legal but ethically dubious dealings in Ukraine, possibly spiced with false claims about the president leading America into nuclear war with Russia, benefitting from his son’s business deals, or leaning on the FBI and DOJ to investigate Trump—may be what ultimately determines who the future Republican Speaker of the House is.
So here are the five foremost obstacles in play:
(1) The GOP majority is too slim. The overwhelming majority of the House GOP Caucus is stridently MAGA, but if Republicans hold the House by only a handful of seats—perhaps even as few as one or two—there’s every possibility a small number of members will declare in advance that they do not support an impeachment of Biden, foreclosing that option because McCarthy (or whoever the next Speaker of the House is) will need every vote in the Caucus to impeach Biden. While it seems unlikely that even a single House Republican would stand on principle in this way, it may not (see below) be principles that ultimately move them.
(2) The GOP majority is too scared. By historical standards—that is, comparing what happened on Election Day to what should have happened, given the fundamentals of the election and historical trend-lines—the GOP got a real shellacking on November 8. Some newly elected Republicans may fear that if they seek to impeach Biden to please Trump (and aid his 2024 presidential campaign against the sitting president) rather than doing the people’s business like they were elected to do, they will lose their seats in two years. The same thought may occur to the many, many Republicans (Boebert almost certainly excepted) who nearly lost races on November 8 that they had thought they;d comfortably win. But also at issue (see below) will be who they blame for all this.
(3) Donald Trump is weakened. The main reason to impeach Biden, in the view of the House GOP Caucus, is to weaken him for the 2024 presidential election by ceaselessly investigating him for the next two years. The intended recipient of baseless and crass harassment of this sort would of course be whoever runs against Mr. Biden in 2024: presumptively, at this point, Trump. (If the GOP nominates anyone but Trump, Trump has already made fairly clear that he will bolt the Republican Party to start his own, splintering the conservative voter base in the United States and giving Biden the 2024 election in a walk.) But if Trump is indeed indicted at the state and/or federal level over the next few months, it makes his nomination by the GOP look less inevitable—indeed, it technically makes his ability to run in 2024 less of a fait accompli, though nothing short of a long prison sentence would technically stop him from appearing on the November 2024 ballot—which might embolden a group of slightly more moderate House Republicans to decline to do Trump’s political bidding by impeaching Biden.
(4) The GOP is weakened. If the 2024 electoral map looks bad for House Republicans—it surely couldn’t look as rosy as the 2022 electoral map did—it could convince some sitting GOP members to make early retirement announcements, in theory freeing them from far-right dogma on the question of impeaching Biden. So while we don’t at present see evidence of widespread principle in the House GOP Caucus, the bleaker 2024 looks for Republican House candidates the more difficult it will be for any new GOP Speaker of the House to hold his (or her) majority together to impeach Joe Biden.
(5) The pressure to impeach may ease. As unlikely as this seems, it is important to realize that Trump’s power over the Republican Party has weakened with the results of Election Day, even if it’s logistically impossible—as noted above—for the party to abandon him without him bolting and splintering the GOP almost immediately.
Trump will be vaguely (if only intermittently) self-aware regarding his diminished authority and understand, if only silently and privately, that he needs to play at least slightly nicer with Congress than he has in the past because he needs the continued friendship of members of Congress in 2024 presidential battleground states. While Proof by no means intends to overstate this new leverage certain members may have over Trump—Trump isn’t a man who acknowledges either debts or weakness, so it’s unclear whether he’d even be capable of seeing a need to negotiate with members of Congress who don’t want to do his 2024 campaign’s dirty work or opposition research by impeaching Biden—if Florida governor Ron DeSantis announces a presidential run it could, at the margins, force Trump to briefly play at being a bit more diplomatic.
The result: less public pressure from Trump on House members who are not keen on risking their competitive seats by engaging in a purely partisan impeachment stunt.
It’s worth noting, too—though this may be too rational and conventional a brand of thinking for the mercurial Trump to accommodate—that it benefits a 2024 Trump run if a GOP-led House actually has some legislative accomplishments to run on. There is now general agreement on both sides of the aisle in Congress that an impeachment almost by definition confounds legislative priorities and renders the lower chamber all but inert until the impeachment process (which can take anywhere from 90 days to a year) is complete. If Trump is strategic—always a dubious presumption—he might prefer a successful 118th Congress to one that has enacted vengeance on the man who beat him by over seven million votes in 2020. But no one should count on that sort of wisdom.
Along with these five key obstacles, there are several others more esoteric: (6) Trump’s top House allies, especially Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), may find themselves so busy with new responsibilities (Jordan, prospectively, with being new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Greene with suddenly having a role on both that committee and, if all goes as expected, the equally powerful House Oversight Committee) that they will want to focus on other new tasks besides impeachment; (7) if the new Speaker of the House has only secured their position by a handful of votes, they may decide that focusing on legislative priorities is a surer path to being re-elected as Speaker than impeachment is; (8) some House members could decide that Trump is unlikely to win in 2024, and therefore may feel less beholden to his whims regarding how they should do their jobs; (9) if DeSantis runs and any House members choose to announce themselves as being in the Florida governor’s corner rather than Trump’s, that may cut their strings of obligation to Trump (at least until the 2024 GOP primaries are complete, but perhaps even after that, if DeSantis wins and Trump bolts the party); and (10) in theory—though this is highly unlikely—the MAGA base could finally move away from Trump due to his failed 2022 endorsements, his likely upcoming indictments, his relentless attacks on popular Republicans like DeSantis and Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), or possibly catastrophically bad polling data going forward relating to his chances of defeating Biden in 2024 (or, if Biden decides not to run for re-election despite presently saying he will, between Trump and a potential Democratic standard-bearer like Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg).
The Wild Cards
Back when George W. Bush was President of the United States, Democratic voters often spoke on social media—half-jokingly—of the idea of a “quickie impeachment.”
The presumptive definition of a quickie impeachment—which was also intermittently been discussed during the Trump administration, both before and after each of his full-blown impeachments occurred—is one the majority party doesn’t expect to win and therefore does in merely a pro forma way: in other words, to please the dictates of posterity or (more likely) its base. Given that House Republicans have already drawn up impeachment articles against Biden eight times (five times with Marjorie Taylor Greene as lead author), couldn’t they simply choose one of these doomed-to-fail documents, force a vote on it, and then go about their business trying to lower taxes for billionaires, cut Social Security and Medicare, and continue building the easily traversed “vanity wall” Donald Trump wants to erect on the nation’s southern border?
The answer is yes and no.
If Biden is impeached, there must be a Senate trial—however brief—unless Senate Republicans decide that such a trial would be too embarrassing for the party and band together with Democrats to ensure that any articles of impeachment are very quickly dispatched off-camera. In any case, impeachment has consequences; the duration of the process can be curtailed only to a degree, and invariably impeaching a president over nothing but policy differences will be unpopular among not just Democrats but the political independents who determine elections in close races. This is certainly why Kevin McCarthy has thus far refused to commit himself to a Biden impeachment.
But what if, following the disastrous results for the Republicans on November 8, it’s not Kevin McCarthy leading the Republicans in the House, but rather someone else?
As Proof detailed in a recent major investigative report, the insurrectionist perjurer Marjorie Taylor Greene has already made clear that she doesn’t have the prerequisite of “evidence” McCarthy does for impeaching President Biden for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” This is, of course, also proven by her previously submitted, evidence-free articles of impeachment against the sitting president, as well as—candidly—everything else she’s ever done while holding political office. If the House Freedom Caucus is balking at voting for a Speaker (McCarthy) who won’t commit to a Biden impeachment, and if Republicans’ MAGA base continues to refuse to blame Trump for anything at all, not only could McCarthy become the scapegoat for November 8 but Trump’s top ally in Congress (or simply someone handpicked by her) could get the former president’s endorsement to become the new—far right—Speaker of the House.
And it goes without saying that a “Speaker Greene” would impeach President Biden regardless of perceived obstacles, as would any other House Freedom Caucus member who might take up the Speaker’s gavel should Rep. Greene decline that honor herself.
{Note: It goes without saying that the odds of Greene herself becoming Speaker of the House are extremely remote. There are enough moderates in the House GOP Caucus—particularly those from “blue” states like New York—who would balk at such a prospect that if the Republicans have only a narrow House majority, it would be virtually impossible to install a far-right firebrand as Speaker. On the other hand, if Trump is understood, as he should be, as having substantial continued influence over the direction of the Republican Party—because he holds in his hands the capacity to destroy it—we cannot know in what direction the mercurial Trump would attempt to influence a future House leadership race, perhaps even using his bully pulpit on social media and his megaphone at rallies to place an untenable degree of pressure on the current Republican leadership in Congress. At a minimum, he could seek to ensure that someone more pliable than McCarthy gets the job; at the outside, he could cajole and threaten caucus members to the point that the unthinkable happens: McCarthy and his bloc capitulate to a House Freedom Caucus Speaker of the House on the condition that they get to remain in leadership positions, or alternately McCarthy is permitted the speakership only on the agreement that he will almost entirely staff his leadership with House Freedom Caucus members. Of course, just as dangerous as these possibilities is that Trump gets behind a seeming moderate who is unscrupulous enough to take direction directly from Trump on all issues; Elise Stefanik of New York, who endorsed Trump’s 2024 presidential bid 48 hours after the midterms and is currently a member of House GOP leadership, could well fit the bill on this score.}
Conclusion
The stakes of the Democratic Party continuing to hold the House couldn’t be higher.
It’s not merely that a two-chamber Democratic majority in the 118th Congress would mean the most successful midterm election for any President of the United States in modern American political history—strengthening the odds that President Biden runs for re-election in 2024 and has broad-based support across the Democratic Party in doing so—but it could also determine whether the House January 6 Committee continues to exist (and as Proof has written repeatedly, it has a great deal of work left to do), whether Americans continue to see inflation relief from a Democratic Congress’s continued commitment to passing legislation with this intended and actual effect (a commitment not extant in the GOP), and whether Joe Biden has even more legislative wins to run on in 2024 as opposed to two years of misery-inducing gridlock and highly performative Republican angst.
While no major media outlet currently has published odds on the Democrats holding the House, a probative-but-unscientific Proof analysis of all remaining races suggests that the odds are non-zero—perhaps 20%—but certainly not overwhelming. It makes the question of whether President Biden will be impeached in 2023 a very timely one.
It should be clear to readers of Proof that a Biden impeachment will not result in a Biden conviction. The chances of this are literally zero, not just because Democrats are almost certain to hold the Senate but for the far more important reason that Joe Biden hasn’t committed any impeachable offenses. The purpose of a Biden impeachment—and in this respect, such a gambit could be quite effective—would in actuality be to bedevil the Biden administration with two years’ worth of subpoenas, interrogations, slander, libel, misinformation, disinformation, innuendo, rumor, speculation, public hearings, and (finally) a sham trial with the sole aim of driving up Biden’s negatives in national and battleground-state polls and leaving doubt among voters about whether he can be trusted with the presidency for a second term.
Indeed, because impeachment begins with simply an impeachment investigation, and because an impeachment investigation needn’t ever result in a vote of impeachment, Republicans could simply announce an impeachment investigation of Joe Biden that conveniently doesn’t end until after the 2024 election—at which point it will either be moot (because Biden has lost the presidency and/or because Republicans have lost the House) or a matter that can be wrapped up with a whimper, having already served its political purpose (as if Biden wins re-election, Republicans will deem that a sufficient referendum on him to not want to continue their impeachment efforts).
Certainly, U.S. politics in the 2020s aren’t like the politics of any other U.S. decade, so it would be no surprise at all if Trump’s Republican Party nakedly wielded its powers of impeachment to essentially do no more than publicly air opposition research on Biden—as a sort of “in-kind donation” to the 2024 Trump presidential campaign—for the next two years. The GOP doesn’t have an official platform (literally), none of its proposed policies are at all popular among political independents, and the losses it just suffered in the 2022 midterms underscore that Americans are not enthused by election deniers or Trump’s party-defining obsession with past presidential elections.
So why not spend two years using Congress’s oversight function to both justify not passing any new legislation—or, at least, not any new legislation with any chance of passing a Democratic-controlled Senate—and to please the MAGA base, especially if the public hearings that would attend upon any such “oversight” conveniently dovetail with the campaign themes Trump is trumpeting on the campaign trail? It’s hard not to see this as the Republicans’ current plan, whether or not dubious investigations of this sort ever blossom into a formal vote on impeachment. (Indeed, one way McCarthy could stave off demands for an immediate impeachment is by giving free rein to Trump’s most radical allies in Congress to investigate Biden, on the promise that the party will as a whole take a wait-and-see approach on transmuting political theater into articles of impeachment. It may well be that, while Republicans currently have nothing to hang their hat on for such articles, a few months of they and their media allies ruthlessly mischaracterizing documents received via subpoena could lead to a facially plausible if terminally flawed case for impeachment.)
Is there a deadline for Republicans making a decision on impeachment? Not really. As noted above, perhaps the most effective impeachment would be one that never goes to a trial in the likely Democratic-controlled Senate. Indeed, if Proof were to speculate—always a dangerous endeavor—Republicans are most likely to come to the conclusion that perpetual investigation is more beneficial to Trump’s new presidential campaign than a failed impeachment, a realization that could lead to a Republican-led House impeaching Biden so close to the 2024 presidential election that the election is held with impeachment hanging over the incumbent’s head rather than hanging in the air as another example (like, say, the Benghazi Committee) of bad GOP performance art.
Control of the House is likely to remain unclear for days or even weeks, so Proof will undoubtedly have cause to revisit this question—and this issue—once again in 2022.
Such a good analysis. Thank you Seth
All that so already wealthy people can be even wealthier. Rich people suck. Apologies to all non-greedy rich people.