McCarthy calls for Biden's impeachment
-
President Biden should be impeached by the incoming House >
Yes, I know, the votes for a conviction are not there at the moment, and probably won’t ever be: The Constitution requires a two-thirds Senate supermajority to convict and remove an elected official from office, and Biden’s Democratic Party will hold a two-seat majority in the upper chamber for the next two years.
Yet there must be an impeachment investigation and, if Biden fails to change course, articles of impeachment. That would forever stain him, which he deserves; more significantly, it would force the Senate to shut down other business and conduct a trial that would expose the depth of our security catastrophe and the fact that Democrats have willfully caused it.
To provide some perspective, during the Obama–Biden years, the Department of Homeland Security regarded it as a crisis if the number of illegal-alien encounters inched up to 1,000 per day, which computes to 365,000 per year. “A thousand [per day] overwhelms the system,” Obama’s former DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, acknowledged in a 2019 interview. At the time, the Trump administration was dealing with four times that amount due to a surge in border arrivals by alien family units and unaccompanied alien minors. (The surge was caused by the refusal of congressional Democrats to cooperate in Trump’s signature border-security priority; it was quelled, as Rich Lowry related, because Trump induced cooperation from other countries.)
Thanks to Biden’s wholesale adoption of transnational-progressive radicalism, we are now at seven times the number that Johnson conceded would constitute a crisis. Post–Title 42, we could find ourselves at 18 times that amount, or perhaps even more — and remember, that’s just the apprehensions, not the got-aways.
We’re talking here not merely about a border-security crisis. We’re leaps and bounds past that. This is an invasion — millions of aliens rushing our border in a manner that is illegal, and thus hostile. (How remarkable that Democrats, who never hesitate to describe a five-hour riot that posed no serious threat to the republic as an insurrection, scream bloody murder when someone uses the word invasion to describe millions of foreigners lawlessly storming our border, with tens to hundreds of thousands more currently staging to storm the gates the moment Title 42 is lifted.) Biden’s refusal to secure the border is potentially an existential crisis for the United States. It already is an existential crisis for border states, which are expected by their federal overlords not just to accept the onslaught but to bear the ruinous costs of public education and health care, in addition to exorbitant supplemental law-enforcement expenditures at a time when crime is already surging nationwide.
In Faithless Execution, my 2014 book on impeachment, I argued that it would be counterproductive for the House to impeach a president without having built a political case first — i.e., without having persuaded the country, across partisan and ideological lines, that the president’s misconduct was so egregious and threatening that removal was warranted. The Framers believed impeachment was an indispensable arrow in Congress’s quiver to ensure that the awesome powers of the presidency were not turned against the nation, particularly on behalf of foreign interests. But a premature or purely partisan impeachment can perversely embolden a president, who is apt to use Senate acquittal as vindication of his misconduct and thus to engage in more of the same and worse. The Democrats’ 2019 impeachment of Donald Trump bears this out: They carried out a strictly partisan process — exactly what the Framers sought to prevent — over behavior that, while censurable, was not significant enough to warrant impeachment; it begat a Trump who became even more audacious in 2020, culminating in the shocking Capitol riot of January 6, 2021.
But we’re in a different posture now. To begin with, even if Biden were emboldened by acquittal, the damage to the country could not get much worse: Without a border, we won’t have a country. If there were an armed invasion of just a few thousand foreigners — a bare fraction of the foreigners now pouring in, who, while mostly unarmed, are transporting not-insignificant amounts of deadly illegal narcotics — a president who refused to act would be impeached and removed forthwith. Biden is not merely refusing to act; he is intentionally doubling down on policies that exacerbate the crisis. To compare, the January 6 Committee convincingly contends that Trump is unfit for the presidency because he not only failed to respond decisively to the Capitol riot but took actions that exacerbated it.
