Rep. Lauren Boebert is forcing a vote on impeaching Joe Biden for his handling of the border by making it a privileged motion. But Republicans are not happy about it.
Speaker McCarthy asked Boebert to address the entire conference before making the privileged motion, even inviting her to speak to the conference this morning. But Boebert has refused and this has angered Republicans who believe it will harm their ability to investigate Biden:
THE HILL – House Republicans on Wednesday teed off on one of their own colleagues, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), over her stunning move to force a vote this week to impeach President Biden.
While no fans of the president, Boebert’s GOP critics said her move to stage an impeachment vote this week is wildly premature, harming the Republicans’ ongoing efforts to investigate the Biden family’s business dealings while undermining potential impeachment efforts in the future.
McCarthy had urged Boebert to address the conference before making a privileged motion to bring her impeachment resolution to the floor, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) told The Hill. Boebert told McCarthy “she would think about doing it,” according to Greene, but went ahead with the privileged motion anyway.
“He urged her, ‘You need to address the conference over this before you do it,’ and she said she would think about doing it. And then she turned around and just went and introduced the privileged resolution right after that,” Greene said.
Greene said McCarthy told the conference he had invited Boebert to speak during Wednesday’s closed-door meeting. The Colorado Republican, however, did not show up.
McCarthy told Republicans to vote against Boebert’s impeachment motion:
At a closed-door meeting of the GOP conference on Capitol Hill, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) took the remarkable step of urging his troops to oppose the impeachment resolution when it hits the floor later in the week, a House Republican told The Hill.
McCarthy told Republicans that he opposed the two impeachments of former President Trump because Democrats were acting on emotion, not facts, according to a source familiar with the Speaker’s remarks.
Several Republicans spoke out against the impeachment motion:
“This shouldn’t be playground games, in my view. This should be serious,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) groused Wednesday. “If there’s real facts for impeachment then you go there. But doing this is wrong, and I think the majority of the conference feels that way.”
Bacon said there are “viable areas” of Biden’s background that merit investigation, but suggested there’s no proof of wrongdoing — at least not yet — to warrant impeachment.
“Impeachment shouldn’t be something that is frivolous,” he said. “We should get to the facts of that, but just doing a privileged motion is wrong,” he said. “It’s a person thinking about themselves instead of the team.”
Others quickly piled on.
“I think that things like impeachment are one of the most awesome powers of the Congress, it’s not something you should flippantly exercise in two days. And I think that it actually undermines efforts to hold people accountable in the future,” Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), a close McCarthy ally, told reporters.
He said the “right way” to go about the matter is through regular order, “empowering the committee chairs and members.”
“It’s important for the Republican conference to act together in unison to counter the bad policies of the Biden administration,” said Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.). “And therefore, if members want to suggest or bring up the idea of a privileged motion, they ought to come to the conference to discuss that in advance and have a collective discussion of it before they take the decision to do it.”
MTG accused Boebert of being a copycat, saying she copied her prior impeachment articles and is using them as her own:
Greene said some members of the conference were mad at Boebert because her privileged motion “came out of nowhere.” And some of the criticism was personal. Greene, who has had public dust-ups with Boebert in the past, accused Boebert of copying her own impeachment push.
“I had already introduced articles of impeachment on Joe Biden for the border, asked her to co-sponsor mine, she didn’t. She basically copied my articles and then introduced them and then changed them to a privileged resolution,” Greene said. “So of course I support ‘em because they’re identical to mine.”
“They’re basically a copycat,” she added.
With enough Republicans upset over this you can be sure it will easily fail.
Republicans have a hard enough time being taken seriously by the media. A flippant impeachment won’t be taken seriously at all because there is no impeachment process behind it.
Of course I think Biden should certainly be impeached, but I understand that Republicans are still investigating Biden on separate issues and want to present a potential impeachment after having had a serious and thorough investigation. They want it to have the legitimacy of a proper impeachment process.