A couple of weeks before the 2022 midterm elections, then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was asked about the prospects of impeachment crusades if House Republicans retook the majority in the chamber. The future House speaker downplayed the possibility.
“I think the country doesn’t like impeachment used for political purposes at all,” the GOP leader told Punchbowl News in late October. Asked if anyone in the Biden administration had done anything that warranted impeachment proceedings, McCarthy added, “I don’t see it before me right now.”
I wrote a prediction of sorts soon after, suggesting the decision might not be entirely his to make: McCarthy was positioned to become speaker, but if his members were determined to impeach someone, he’d likely lack the political strength to throw cold water on the intra-party fire.
That was eight months ago. Now, McCarthy hasn’t just opened the door to impeachment, he apparently can’t stop talking about it.
On Sunday morning, the GOP speaker, focused on Hunter Biden, raised the prospect of launching an impeachment inquiry into Attorney General Merrick Garland. On Monday, McCarthy went on Fox News and said the same thing again.
Two days later, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told Fox News she’d discussed the strategy of impeaching Garland with McCarthy, and the right-wing Georgian added that she believes it’s likely to actually happen. Soon after, the House speaker himself appeared on Fox News and once again said:
“Someone has lied here. If we find that Garland has lied to Congress, we will start an impeachment inquiry.”
McCarthy was seated alongside a nodding Rep. Jim Jordan — who, as the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, would be chiefly responsible for helping advance an impeachment process.
For good measure, the House speaker then published another tweet, reiterating the fact that he’s prepared to “start an impeachment inquiry” against the attorney general.
This is, of course, the same attorney general who’s gone out of his way to, as a Washington Post report put it last week, “chart a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust” in the Justice Department. Republicans are determined to tear him down anyway.
To the extent that reality has any bearing in the debate, it’s true that there are differences between assurances Garland gave Congress about the Justice Department’s handling of the Hunter Biden case and claims from an IRS official named Gary Shapley. That said, as a New York Times report explained this week: [I]t remains unclear how much of the difference in the accounts reflects possible factors like miscommunication, clashing substantive judgments among agencies over how best to pursue a prosecution, or personal enmity among officials working on a high-pressure, high-profile case. Investigators like Mr. Shapley whose job it is to uncover evidence often have different perspectives from prosecutors who have to take into account how to treat defendants fairly and present cases to juries.
In other words, when McCarthy says that “someone has lied here,” it’s quite possible, if not likely, that no one has lied here. But to follow up on our earlier coverage, I remain curious about McCarthy’s motivations. He’s gone from a congressional leader who was wholly disinterested in impeachment to someone who suddenly can’t stop talking about it. We’ve never received a full and detailed list of the private side deals McCarthy struck in January to get his speaker’s gavel, or the more recent agreements he reached after the House Freedom Caucus seized control of the House floor. It’s hard not to wonder: Did McCarthy switch gears because a sincere change of heart, or is he still repaying debts to his more radical members? This post revises our related earlier coverage.
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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