The House GOP's impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden has the potential to become an ongoing headache during his reelection campaign as three House committees investigate the president and his connection to the business dealings of his son Hunter Biden.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) claimed the inquiry was a "logical next step" after months of Republicans looking into any wrongdoing from Biden as family members traded on his political influence during a press conference on Tuesday.
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But if past impeachments of former presidents are any indication, the results could be mixed.
For one, Democrats have coalesced around defending Biden while separating the president from his son's business dealings surrounding the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisima. "There is not a shred of evidence that President Joe Biden has engaged in wrongdoing. There is not a shred of evidence that President Joe Biden has committed an impeachable offense," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said on Tuesday during a press conference. "There is not a shred of evidence that President Joe Biden has committed a crime. This is an illegitimate impeachment inquiry, period. Full stop. It's a waste of time and taxpayer dollars."
“Our job, or my job, will be to remind the American people of that over and over again — that Hunter Biden is not the administration,” Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) told Politico of their strategy to counteract the impeachment inquiry.
In comparison, Republican senators are skeptical of the effectiveness of a Biden impeachment investigation, while House Republicans have long wanted to launch articles of impeachment against Biden. "You don’t bring a vote to the floor unless you are pretty sure that you can get the amount of votes that you need," Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) said on NBC's "Meet the Press NOW" this week. Any impeachment trial that made it to the Democratic-led Senate would be highly unlikely to succeed.
A lack of definitive connection between the president and his son is one issue that some political experts said may help Biden downplay the investigation's impact. Yet the media attention and the time spent responding to Republicans could hinder his ability to campaign on the issues he wants. And Hunter Biden's indictment Thursday over federal firearm charges is unlikely to help.
"The impeachment inquiry may complicate other distractions and other concerns about the Biden reelection campaign," said Meena Bose, executive dean and director of presidential studies at Hofstra University, "and will take time as far as requests for documents, subpoena power that an impeachment inquiry brings for the three committees that are investigating, but the impeachment inquiry alone at this point in time does not appear to be directly consequential for Biden's reelection."
Chief among the distractions Biden could face in responding to the investigation include concerns over his age and ability to serve another four years in the White House, low approval numbers, and a lack of enthusiasm for Biden among key Democratic constituents. His approval ratings as of Tuesday were at 42% according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll, although with more than a year until the 2024 elections, much could change.
"Approval ratings now don't really make clear [or] indicate what's going to happen a year from now or 14 months from now, but certainly there's obviously a concern when approval ratings are lower," Bose added.
Other experts cautioned that Biden could actually see a positive consequence from the inquiry similar to former President Bill Clinton's impeachment over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, which led to Democrats gaining five House seats, one of only two times since 1934 that the president's party gained House seats during the midterm elections while blocking Republicans from gaining any more seats in the Senate.
"The 1998 midterm election, it's not completely unprecedented, but it was almost unprecedented in terms of the support that Clinton was able to generate in November of 1998 when all the impeachment furor was reaching its peak," said Russell Riley, co-chair of the University of Virginia's Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program and author of Inside the Clinton White House: An Oral History.
The perception that the impeachment was done for political reasons during the highly partisan 1990s may have helped advantage Clinton and the Democrats politically. A New York Times-CBS News poll in December 1998 showed that 53% of participants "said that impeachment is punishment enough for what Mr. Clinton has done," and 58% viewed the Republican Party unfavorably. And it could help the party once again.
"It strikes me as at least plausible that unless the House Republicans are very careful, they will give him something to get energetic about," Riley said of Biden. "And if the Republicans aren't careful, they're at risk of sort of repeating what they did in 1998. And that did not have a favorable effect for the party, and in fact, killed two speakers of the House."
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich resigned in the wake of the 1998 midterm elections, and predecessor Bob Livingston resigned during the Clinton investigation after it was revealed he had an extramarital affair. "So it could be explosive and not in a very good way for the House Republicans," Riley continued. "But again, to go back to my original point, a lot of this is contingent on whether there's a there, there and whether they really do have hard evidence that the president has misbehaved in this instance."
Frank Bowman, professor emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Law and author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump, said he doesn't think the Biden investigation will lead to any criminal charges but pointed to former President Richard Nixon's sinking approval numbers during the investigation that almost led to an impeachment before he resigned from office for historical patterns.
"Nixon's popularity was very solid [and] bipartisan when various investigations that we now put under the general heading of Watergate began," Bowman said. "By the time the House Judiciary Committee voted to approve articles of impeachment, his favorability ratings, if memory serves, went down to about 25% when he left office. ... However, with respect to President Clinton, his popularity actually precipitously increased during the course of the investigation."
In the days just before Nixon resigned on Aug. 8, 1974, his approval rating was at 24%, and his disapproval rating was at 66%. On June 16, 1972, the day before five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate, Nixon's approval rating was at 59% and his disapproval rating was at 30%.
When it comes to former President Donald Trump's first impeachment case, the results are more muddled. "Trump's case, the situation is a little more equivocal because although around the time of his first impeachment, you can look at polling data that suggests he got a very modest bump in some polls but also not in others," Bowman said. "He got a very brief favourability boost maybe around the time of his impeachment, but it went back down again to the sort of high 30s or very low 40s before the impeachment."
"Frankly, it's unclear what effect the first impeachment had on Trump's overall standing in the country and certainly what it had in the ultimate campaign against Biden," he added.
As Biden and Trump both seek reelection, the political climate has changed. Trump, now twice impeached and facing 91 indictments across four criminal cases, is the current GOP front-runner in the presidential primary race. Despite widespread concern among voters, the 80-year-old Biden will likely represent Democrats during the 2024 elections, barring any catastrophic events. To what extent any of the legal or criminal cases both men are facing will harm their campaigns is unclear.
Though Jason Opal, a professor of history and classical studies at McGill University who specializes in politics, said Biden's impeachment inquiry will unlikely persuade swing voters who will help determine the presidential elections. "My read on this is that the Impeachment inquiry won't do much for either side," Opal said. "Because most independents, about a third according to a recent poll from Fox News, think that Biden did something wrong, presumably related to Hunter Biden, whereas two-thirds of the independents think that Trump did something wrong related to the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, so I don't know that it's really going to help."
Opal was referencing an Aug. 16 Fox News poll in which 62% of independents said Trump did something illegal concerning the 2020 election. Yet only 33% of independents said Biden did something illegal in relation to Hunter Biden's business dealings. "But on the other hand, I don't think it will help Biden either because the independent voters who will decide things aren't concerned about him being corrupt. They're concerned about him being old. And that just doesn't change," Opal continued.
Opal said the Biden investigation may prove to be frustrating for non-Trump presidential candidates who don't have the former president's legal baggage. "Looking at the Republican side of things, there must be some frustration for someone like Nikki Haley, who in current polling would pretty handily defeat Biden or would be very, very competitive against Biden, but she's way behind in the primaries," he said.
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Haley is the only GOP candidate outside of the margin of error in a recent CNN poll that was shown to defeat Biden in a hypothetical matchup. Yet she trails Trump in national polls. A RealClearPolitics poll average shows Haley at 5.8%, far below Trump at 56.1%.
Ultimately, experts such as Opal and Bowman are concerned that the Biden impeachment could trivialize the importance of misbehavior among presidents. "It indicates a really distressing carelessness is the nicest way to put it," Bowman said. "House Republicans are devaluing the impeachment mechanism, which is a critical, constitutional tool to be used in the case of genuine presidential misconduct. By treating it as nothing more than a part of a silly political game, they make it less likely that it can be used properly in the case of genuine presidential misconduct."