Impeachment investigation

The capitulation of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to Donald Trump and his loudmouth acolytes in Congress to the planned impeachment of President Joe Biden shows the extent to which the Republican Party has sacrificed all pretense of principle, or simply basic governance, to the all-out war on truth that the party’s MAGA base demands.
McCarthy’s ordering of an impeachment investigation into Biden last week is the first such investigation undertaken against an American president in which there was no evidence of so much as a misdemeanor, much less a high crime. For purely political reasons, Biden has been under the GOP’s microscope for more than five years. The former Trump Justice Department and Senate Republicans spent three years trying to link Joe Biden to his son Hunter’s business activities. They had access to every investigatory weapon, from subpoenas to search warrants to grand juries. Trump even personally leveraged U.S. military aid to Ukraine to pressure President Zelensky to announce its own investigation into Biden to help Trump’s re-election bid, an act that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Since Republicans gained control of the House last year, they’ve relentlessly investigated the president, calling in witnesses and issuing subpoenas like tossed candy at a 4th of July parade. Over 12,000 pages of bank records and Treasury documents were reviewed. His son’s former business partners, federal agents assigned to the Hunter Biden investigation, and even the senior Biden’s longtime bookkeeper, all testified to Congress, under oath. The documents and testimony all revealed the exact same thing— absolutely no connection between Hunter Biden’s overseas businesses and his father.
So disappointing were the results, that the Republicans resorted to posting nude pictures of Hunter Biden at one of their hearings. It had zero probative value to their investigation and was patently offensive to any normal human being, but it was tossed like chum to the GOP’s increasingly unhinged MAGA base.
For years, the GOP has made false or unsupported claims, accusing Biden of accepting bribes or heading off investigations into Burisma, a Ukrainian company with ties to Hunter Biden. All of these claims have been thoroughly debunked by nonpartisan investigators. With the GOP’s own investigations now undermining their false claims, reasonable people would realize it’s time to find something better to do, like pass a budget resolution so the federal government doesn’t shut down in ten days.
“Reasonable” is not a term, of course, that can be used to describe those calling the shots in the GOP these days. With their investigation having come up empty and rapidly losing relevance, the Republicans did the only thing they could think of to allow them to continue blowing smoke up the public’s rear end— launch an impeachment investigation. The result? More headlines as they plow the same fruitless ground over and over again! More breathless and fact-free commentary on Fox News! More campaign contributions!
Their strategy is plain, it’s an effort to muddy the political waters and delegitimize the impeachments and multiple indictments of Donald Trump through false equivalency. As if to say, “See, how can you complain about Trump when Biden is corrupt, too?”
Yet the evidence of Trump’s corrupt nature is all around us and has been laid out in voluminous witness testimony (virtually all provided by Trump-supporting Republicans), emails, text messages, video, call transcripts, recorded phone conversations, jury decisions, and court rulings. So, after five years of GOP-led investigation, where is the equivalent evidence showing corrupt dealings by Joe Biden? It doesn’t exist. The only thing the GOP has proven is that the claims they continue to make about Biden are false.
Sadly, none of this matters to the spineless Speaker McCarthy, who was forced to bow to pressure from the bullies and thugs in his party, like Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Matt Gaetz, who have no agenda other than wielding power like a sledgehammer to wreak havoc on American institutions and revenge on anyone who would stand in their way.
These aren’t people interested in governing. They’re craven attention seekers and cheap grifters looking to line their own pockets peddling garbage to those poor suckers who actually fall for their schtick. They’ll say anything and do anything to get their way. And they’re the ones pulling the strings of leadership in today’s GOP. No wonder fair-minded Republicans are leaving the party in droves. It’s an absolute embarrassment.