It’s been about a month since House Speaker Kevin McCarthy jolted the political world, declaring during a Fox News interview that Republicans’ investigations into President Joe Biden and his family had risen “to the level of impeachment inquiry.” In the weeks that followed, the GOP leader has had plenty of opportunities to walk the line back.
He’s doing the opposite. NBC News reported:
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Tuesday that the House could move forward with an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden if his administration doesn’t provide documents Republicans say they want to review. During a Fox Business interview Tuesday night, McCarthy, R-Calif., was asked whether he has made up his mind whether to launch an impeachment inquiry into Biden.
“The thing that holds up whether we’ll do an impeachment inquiry: Provide us the documents we’re asking,” the House speaker said. “The whole determination here is how the Bidens handle this.” McCarthy added that if “they” withhold documents, “we will move forward with impeachment inquiry when we come back into session.”
Of course, implicit in this rhetoric is a nagging detail Republicans prefer not to dwell on: GOP lawmakers still don’t have any actual evidence of Biden having done anything wrong. The House speaker apparently believes an “impeachment inquiry” will open up new investigatory avenues, but that starts to sound an awful lot like a fishing expedition: In effect, McCarthy is saying, “We need to open an investigation to look for possible evidence that might justify the investigation.”
That’s not how any of this is supposed to work.
Complicating matters, the California congressman made a variety of references in the Fox Business interview to “the documents,” but it’s far from clear exactly what he was referring to. Republican Rep. James Comer, the hapless chairman of the House Oversight Committee, recently boasted that in response to the many subpoenas he’s sent to the Biden administration, his panel has “gotten 100% of what we requested.”
The Hill reported, meanwhile, that some of the documents McCarthy wants “were apparently never requested by the GOP.”
But as part of the same interview, the House speaker summarized his concerns with a series of questions. “Did they take bribes?” McCarthy asked. “Did they deal in the business? … The whole determination here is how the Bidens handle this.”
At the heart of the problem was the Republican playing fast and loose with pronouns. We know, for example, that Joe Biden didn’t “take bribes” or “deal in the business” — facts the GOP’s star witness recently confirmed. But McCarthy kept referencing “they,” and in context, he seemed to be referring to multiple people, not just the president. As a Washington Post analysis explained, the House speaker’s rhetoric “conflates Joe-Biden-as-president (‘the Biden administration’) with Joe-Biden-as-person-who-has-the-last-name-Biden (‘the Bidens’). This has been common practice since even before Republicans regained control of the House in January. That Joe Biden’s son Hunter was involved in a sprawling and at times dubious set of business engagements, efforts that looped in his uncle Jim (and, it seems, other relatives) has allowed McCarthy and allies like House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) to refer to the actions of ‘the Biden family,’ lumping the president into the mix through association.” It’s a rhetorical slight of hand that reflects the inconvenient fact that Republicans want to uncover dirt that makes the president look bad, but they still haven’t found anything.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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