The House impeachment inquiry kicks off this morning — I’ll be part of Fox News’s coverage of the hearing, which may last all day. To repeat what I’ve said before, I think this is a strategic error by Republicans.

As many of us said during the 2019 Trump Ukraine impeachment, and as I still believe, the Framers made impeachment hard to do because they were afraid of its being used as a political weapon. An impeachment that proceeds along party lines just diminishes the force of what Madison regarded as an “indispensable” congressional check on abuse of presidential power. (I discussed this history in Faithless Execution.) Impeachment is the political equivalent of the nuclear option, and we’ll regret (if we don’t already) its being turned into something more like a partisan censure — that the target and the opposition party wear as a badge of honor and a rally/fundraising-cry.

What’s true of impeachment is also true of impeachment inquiries. I would have less objection to an inquiry opened along partisan lines, at least if it were opened based on a resolution in which the full House votes and establishes an impeachment committee’s jurisdiction. An inquiry, after all, is really just an investigation and doesn’t have to lead to articles of impeachment. Plus, if the president is guilty of impeachable offenses, the investigators have to have an opportunity to draw attention to the misconduct and make the case. That’s the best way to get to a properly bipartisan impeachment process — and it has to be bipartisan if it’s worth doing at all because conviction, removal, and disqualification in an eventual Senate impeachment trial can’t happen absent a two-thirds’ supermajority vote.

That’s part of why the current impeachment inquiry is a mistake. It has not been approved by the full House. Speaker Kevin McCarthy knew a vote to begin the inquiry would lose. He is trying to get away with unilaterally authorizing it because he is between a rock and a hard place: in too tenuous a position to face down the Trump base that demands an inquiry, but unwilling to hold a losing vote that would undermine the important work of the committees that have been investigating Biden.

In 2019, when Democrats initially began the impeachment inquiry without a vote, not only did House Republicans rightly take the position that the inquiry was illegitimate; the Justice Department opined in kind, and its Office of Legal Counsel’s opinion became the Trump administration’s rationale for not cooperating. Of course, Pelosi did eventually conduct a vote to approve the inquiry, and the House ended up including an impeachment article citing Trump’s obstruction of the Ukraine inquiry. But that only underscores that it’s vital to have a House resolution supporting something as dire as an inquiry into impeaching a U.S. president.

The failure to hold off on an impeachment inquiry until the House had at least full Republican support is an unforced error. The Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees have been doing a fine job investigating and exposing the Biden Family Business. As the memo the committees released on the eve of today’s hearing explains, the influence-peddling scheme raked in a staggering $24 million just between 2014 and 2019 — $15 million of which went to the Bidens, and $9 million to their partners. There is extensive evidence that the Biden Justice Department has obstructed the investigation. Public opinion has significantly shifted from unawareness of the scandal, news about which has been suppressed by the media-Democratic complex, to the perception that the president was complicit in a corruption arrangement in which piles of money were collected from apparatchiks of corrupt and anti-American regimes.

By proceeding with an impeachment inquiry unapproved by a House vote, the Republicans agitating for the inquiry have hurt the committees’ investigative efforts. Not that the Biden administration was cooperating — or will cooperate — with the inquiry, but now Republicans have given the administration a valid reason to flout information demands, and it can even rely on the last Republican Justice Department to support its position.

Consistent with this, at the start of this morning’s hearing, the senior Democrat at the inquiry, Representative Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), threw Republican leaders for a loop by pointing out that, since the inquiry is not approved by a House vote, the remarks by Republican chairmen accusing President Biden violated normal committee rules that still apply. He then moved for a subpoena to be issued to Rudy Giuliani and an associate of his (Lev Parnas) to explore what they were doing in Ukraine to dig up dirt on the Bidens. Raskin took glee in the majority Republicans’ voting down the request, enabling him to portray them as interested only in politically helpful evidence, not all the evidence.

Yes, it’s theater, sure — and a rule has never existed that ever gave a Democrat the slightest hesitation to attack the character of not just President Trump but whatever Republican president happened to be in office at the time. The 2019 Ukraine impeachment was a Democrat-run clinic in steering proceedings away from unhelpful evidence — particularly evidence that Trump was actually right to suspect the Bidens of corruption in connection with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company.

But that brings me to my final point. There is no chance that Biden will be removed from office. Never mind that Democrats hold a Senate majority; for now Republicans lack even the votes for an impeachment inquiry, let alone impeachment articles. Obviously, then, what’s underway is a dramatic production — the kind the January 6 committee used to do in prime time (Democrats made this world, so I hope they like living in it).

Okay . . . but if you’re going to do theater, though, how about doing theater that people really care about? The Biden influence-peddling is crucially important, and that’s why we’ve spent so much time covering it. Nevertheless, what has the country on fire, what has created a crisis in America’s cities that has even Democrats complaining about Biden, is the border crisis. Yet, for now, it is not part of the impeachment inquiry. The word “border” does not appear in the chairmen’s memo.

President Biden has intentionally eviscerated the southern border and, broadly, American border security. He is abetting an invasion by millions of illegal aliens. Our cities are drowning because Biden has let a tide of illegal aliens wash over United States that, in population terms, exceeds the size of most of our largest cities and many of our states. The invasion has exacerbated the fentanyl crisis that is killing tens of thousands of Americans annually. In the cities and states, our schools, social services, and law-enforcement services are being crushed under the weight of one man’s willful refusal to abide by his oath to execute the laws faithfully.

If there is going to be an investigation into whether than man ought to be impeached, shouldn’t his most impeachable offense be a part of it?