J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy talks to reporters at the Capitol in Washington, July 17, 2023.
In the annals of American history, we’ve never had a presidential impeachment process begin because the House Speaker feared for his own job.
Well, not until today.
Reeking from the slime of Florida swamps, Freedom Caucus member Matt Gaetz rose on the House floor today “to serve notice, Mr. Speaker, that you are out of compliance with the agreement that allowed you to assume this role” (the Speakership). To win the votes from Gaetz and his ilk that enabled him to win that post, Kevin McCarthy was compelled to agree to their demand that a single House Republican was all it took to force a vote on the Speaker’s continuing tenure. The spirit, if not the letter, of that agreement, Gaetz noted, required McCarthy to suspend the deal he’d cut with the president last spring to extend the debt limit and to bring a balanced-budget constitutional amendment to the floor.
McCarthy has not yet complied with those demands, though he appears poised to demand massive cuts to the spending authorized in the debt limit deal. Scrambling to keep Gaetz from going off fully cocked (half-cocked is the best one could expect), however, McCarthy did authorize a House investigation into President Biden today on impeachment charges, even though those charges don’t really exist.
Though Republicans are a party that now drapes itself in the banner of parents’ rights, the worst that can be said of Biden is that he’s guilty of undue paternal solicitude to his undeniably screwed-up son. I doubt McCarthy believes that that rises to the level of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that the Constitution requires for impeachment and conviction. I don’t doubt that he hopes initiating the impeachment process will save his own skin.
Previously, the Speaker had vowed that he wouldn’t initiate impeachment hearings until the House—that is, all House Republicans—voted to go forward with them. As he lacked the votes to do that, he weighed the Freedom Caucus’s threat to his Speakership against that from the invertebrate slightly moderate caucus and concluded that his survival required caving to his right. Hence his authorization today that lets the impeachment process begin.
It’s really McCarthy’s job that’s on the line in all this, not Biden’s. But if job insecurity is to be his lot, the Speaker has decided that he won’t experience it all by himself.
