Republican investigations into former President Joe Biden’s mental acuity while in office could soon offer the GOP reprieve from weeks of intense disputes among its members and answers to the public.

Several GOP-led inquiries in Congress and the Trump administration are reaching a fever pitch as competing factions within the party remain divided over President Donald Trump’s domestic policy agenda and his own “big beautiful breakup” with one-time ally Elon Musk.

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Congress and Trump are pushing inquiries on multiple fronts to determine who was calling the shots during the Biden presidency and whether documents, including pardons and liberal executive orders signed with an automatic signature, are valid if Biden may not have been aware of them.

“Beyond just the politics of this, and those that have already been litigated in the election, it’s the constitutional issues,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), a co-leader of one of the investigations.

But putting the spotlight back on Trump’s predecessor is a double-edged sword for the GOP.

It can redirect media scrutiny from the party’s internal squabbling over Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and his feud with the billionaire Musk. However, the party could also see its long-awaited findings about Biden, whom they insist was mentally unfit to serve, overshadowed by uncoordinated and competing investigations.

“The whole country watched the decline,” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), who is co-leading an investigation with Cornyn, said of Biden. “Many were in denial. This guy had the nuclear codes and got lost in the bathroom. It’s very concerning, I think, as a constitutional issue.”

In the Senate, Schmitt and Cornyn will lead a June 18 hearing that will offer a table-setter for ensuing GOP-led inquiries based on the belief that Biden’s mental health deteriorated in office to the point he was incapable of leading the nation. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, authors of Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which detailed Biden’s alleged cognitive decline and efforts to orchestrate a “cover-up,” declined an invitation from Cornyn to appear. Other possible witnesses are unknown but are likely to include those from the media and legal experts, according to a source.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) is also conducting his own investigation behind the scenes. He has contacted 28 current and former aides seeking “voluntary” interviews about Biden’s health in office, a debate that was reignited last month with the former president’s cancer diagnosis.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) is running a parallel but far more aggressive inquiry into Biden that has homed in on his use of the autopen and whether former White House officials used it without his knowledge. In the investigation’s latest escalation, Comer subpoenaed Biden’s physician for a deposition later this month.

And the Justice Department, at the direction of Trump, will open a vast investigation into Biden’s health, the alleged cover-up, and whether someone else may have been secretly in control of the Oval Office.

But there’s consternation among some Republicans that parts of the efforts are overly broad, overlapping, and that inquiries led by Congress could be overshadowed by the DOJ’s ability to better compel information and testimony. There is no evidence that any of the investigations are coordinating.

“I hope what doesn’t happen is somebody just jumps to a show-trial type of hearing without documentation, without having done the work, without having talked to people separately, see what stories jive and which ones don’t,” Johnson said. “I’ve found coordinating investigations between House and Senate don’t work too well. … It’s even a little dicey between Congress and the administration.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who, like Johnson, opposes Trump’s tax-and-spending bill, said questions about Biden’s use of the autopen are “valid” and a “reasonable question to ask.” But he suggested other aspects might be “overly broad.”

For their part, Democrats say the focus on Trump’s predecessor is nothing but an attempt to distract from the present.

“You can tell things are going poorly for Republicans when they throw out their bulls***, and there are clear efforts to distract the public from their terrible s***,” Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE) said. “That’s what this is.”

“It’s to distract from their incompetence and their cruelty,” added Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee. “That’s all this is, a waste of time, a waste of money.”

Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), Biden’s closet Senate ally, recalled his time as a county executive in Delaware when he dreaded the one day of the month where a staffer would plop down a “stack of 1,000 documents” that required his signature. Biden’s use of the autopen, he said, would be “essential to carrying out the functions of a large government.”

“The number of things the U.S. president has to sign would boggle the imagination,” Coons said. “So, I don’t think there’s a there there. I think this is more political.”

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The Biden investigations could reopen an old wound for Democrats, whose struggle to rebuild a diminished brand remains a work in progress. But many see the best way, at least for now, to handle what they call outlandish assertions will be to ignore them entirely.

“To be really blunt, I wasn’t preparing to comment on it before you asked,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) told the Washington Examiner. “I have no problem responding to your questions. But frankly, nobody else has asked me.”

David Sivak contributed to this report.