House Speaker Mike Johnson announced Saturday that he believes he has enough votes to launch an official impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
Appearing on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends Weekend” alongside House GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik, he argued that launching an official inquiry is “necessary” because of the ongoing stonewalling from the Biden White House.
“It’s become a necessary step,” he said. “Elise and I both served on the impeachment defense team of Donald Trump twice when the Democrats used it for brazen, partisan political purposes. We decried that use of it. This is very different. Remember, we are the rule of law team. We have to do it very methodically.”
“Our three committees of jurisdiction — judiciary, oversight, ways and means — have been doing an extraordinary job following the evidence where it leads. But now we’re being stonewalled by the White House, because they’re preventing at least two to three DOJ witnesses from coming forward, a former White House counsel, the national archives . . . the White House has withheld thousands of pages of evidence,” he added.
Listen to some of what he said below:
Johnson also believes he has enough GOP votes to launch the inquiry without any Democrat support.
As to how soon this might happen, NBC News notes that “Republicans leaving a closed-door conference meeting [on Friday] indicated that the House could vote to formally authorize an impeachment inquiry into the president as early as next week.”
“That’s the plan,” Rep. Ralph Norman reportedly told reporters.
“The sooner the better,” House Oversight Committee chair James Comer reportedly added. “I think our conference went home last week and they heard from people at Walmart, people on Main Street who were like find out the truth about Joe Biden’s knowledge and involvement in his family shady business.”
Some might be wondering what the difference is between what’s happening now and what happened in September, when then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy ostensibly opened up his own impeachment inquiry.
The problem was McCarthy didn’t hold an actual impeachment inquiry vote. He opened an inquiry informally — much like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did during former President Donald Trump’s tenure in office — thus leaving the door open for stonewalling.
“The White House now is saying that they don’t want to cooperate,” Rep. Mike Lawler told NBC News. “We have already seen bank records that have come out that are pretty jarring, and contradict what the president said during the 2020 presidential campaign. So there are a lot of questions. We will see what the speaker decides with the process as we move forward.”
Also speaking with the network, Rep. Nick LaLota vowed to vote for the inquiry.
“The inquiry — nobody should be afraid of it,” he said. “It’s just a mere elicitation of facts and it gives subpoenas more power. And there seems to be a lot of smoke around where the president and his family have earned their money overseas. The American public deserves to know the facts surrounding how the president and his family earned that money.”
.@GOPoversight has now obtained enough evidence to proceed on an impeachment inquiry vote.
Date to be announced soon.
The American people deserve the truth, facts, and a complete investigation.
— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) December 1, 2023
Democrats, of course, are not pleased.
“They’ve been at it for 10 months. They have not found a single shred of evidence that President Biden has engaged in any crime — a felony, a misdemeanor — much less than an impeachable offense,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, bellyached to NBC News.
“There’s simply nothing there. I’d like to teach them that the Constitution does not define impeachment as an opportunity to explain policy disagreements. Impeachment is for high crimes and misdemeanors against the union. And so we’re dealing with people who are literally constitutional idiots,” he added.
Keep in mind the “constitutional idiots” on the left twice impeached former President Trump based on virtually nothing — leading to the former president being acquitted both times.
The White House has for its part claimed it hasn’t been stonewalling.
“White House counsel’s office spokesman Ian Sams insisted Friday that Biden had cooperated with document requests from Congress, providing ‘more than 35,000 pages of private financial records’ and ‘more than 2,000 pages of Treasury Department financial reports,'” according to the New York Post.
NEW >> As @HouseGOP meets this morning to discuss their illegitimate “impeachment inquiry” (to distract from their vote on you know who), they increasingly allege “stonewalling” to rationalize a vote on impeachment
One problem:
That’s completely false
WH memo has the facts >> pic.twitter.com/SS9sExUtLG
— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) December 1, 2023
But Republicans maintain that the turned-over documents and records have not included key pieces of evidence, including Air Force Two flight manifests, visitor logs from Biden’s Delaware residences, details on sales of Hunter Biden’s art, and the contents of the classified documents the president was caught with.
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V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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