Next year’s presidential election here in America could turn out to be the most absurd in the nation’s history.
On the one hand, Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, much like Navalny in Russia, would be under indictment by the justice machine led by his own opponent, the sitting president. On the other hand, Joe Biden, the sitting president himself, could be under impeachment by a Congress led by his opponent’s own party.
There is a fair chance that when we get to about this time next year, neither Trump nor Biden will be on the ballot. However, this is already gearing up to be such an unprecedented presidential campaign that previous experience is of limited use in predicting its outcome. For one, the left still has not been able to establish that their indictments against Trump also make him ineligible to run for president. This opens many absurd scenarios, including one where Trump is found guilty of whatever charge they have thrown at him, goes to jail, wins the presidential election, takes the oath of office, and pardons himself.
But wait—it gets better. Just as his opponent, the sitting president, thought he neutralized Trump, he himself could be removed from office before he even gets a chance to win a second term. Speaking to Breitbart News on Friday September 1st, Speaker of the House Kevin McCartthy explained how the House of Representatives would open a formal impeachment inquiry against President Biden:
To open an impeachment inquiry is a serious matter, and House Republicans would not take it lightly or use it for political purposes. The American people deserve to be heard on this matter through their elected representatives
The impeachment would be based on substantiated allegations that Joe Biden is corrupt—and corrupt at levels unpalatable even to a political establishment hardened by generations of turning politics into business.
What McCarthy is referring to with his statement about not taking the impeachment issue lightly is the contrast between a formally correct impeachment inquiry and the one that the Democrats launched against President Trump in 2019. In that case, Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi simply proclaimed that an impeachment inquiry had begun; with McCarthy as speaker, it would take a majority of the House of Representatives to start that same process against Biden.
An impeachment inquiry would not necessarily lead to formal impeachment of the president—think of it as an investigation into the probable cause for impeachment. Nevertheless, the very fact that McCarthy is openly talking about it is a serious matter, one that President Biden should take to heart. Kevin McCarthy is a power player more than a principled conservative, but he is also a cautious man. You do not become speaker of the House without securing your pants with both belt and suspenders before you go to work in the morning.
Simply put, McCarthy will not lose an impeachment vote. He will not ask the House of Representatives to vote on an impeachment inquiry without securing a majority beforehand. The very fact that he is talking about it means that he has already begun probing his Republican majority in the House on where they stand, and on what he has to do to secure the right outcome of the vote.
It is a safe bet that he does not yet know if he can get an impeachment inquiry through the House. His statement to Breitbart comes in response to media rumors of impeachment talks among House Republicans, especially those on the conservative side. McCarthy needed to give himself an ‘out’ if he cannot secure 218 votes out of the 435 members of the House. With 222 Republicans, McCarthy can only lose four votes, but even the loss of one would be problematic from a political viewpoint.
There is no doubt that there are reasons to impeach Biden—his corruption has reached problematic levels, even by Washington standards. The problem for McCarthy is to what extent all of the Republicans in the House will have the fortitude to go along with an impeachment vote. Democrats and their affiliates are likely already hard at work to find ways to eliminate McCarthy’s impeachment majority before it even comes to a vote. Therefore, the issue of whether or not Biden will be under formal impeachment inquiry comes down to the ability of Republican Congressmen to stand up to the enormous pressure that Biden supporters will put on them.
There are three ways that such pressure could be applied. First, there is the ‘challenger’ pressure. Democrats could approach Republicans who won their last election by a narrow margin, and let them know that if they vote for an impeachment inquiry, their Democrat opponent in the next election will get a major boost in funding. This type of pressure has worked in the past, but it has lost its appeal in recent decades with the rising levels of tension and outright hostility in many parts of American politics. Today, every race for Congress is hotly contested and receives funding as if the future of the country depended on it.
The second type of pressure is more positive in nature. A member of Congress can be promised a position on the board of a company or an organization, or a lobbying job with a fat paycheck, if he or she simply abstains from voting for the impeachment inquiry. The weaker the mind of the Congressman, the smaller the de facto bribe needed to win him or her over.
For the Democrats, this is a more productive way to put pressure on Republicans—and the other way around. A remarkable number of Congressmen and Senators retire to a luxurious lifestyle after having altruistically sacrificed many years of their lives to public service on a meager paycheck. However, it is also the type of pressure that is easy for allies of Speaker McCarthy to counter: the Republicans are just as good at offering post-Congressional careers to their own people, and to opponents, as the Democrats are.
Third, and most damningly, the Democrats can resort to the scandalous type of pressure. They can simply tell Republicans in Congress that they know all about his tax problems or his adultery. They can let the person in question know that they are aware that he or she has bedroom preferences that are inconsistent with the family values that the good Congressman espoused in the last election.
There was a time when this type of pressure was the easiest to apply of them all. In recent years, the crop of absolutely depraved Congressmen and Senators has shrunk noticeably. It is still easy to find examples of the normal levels of moral feebleness—a fiscal conservative will gladly sell his values for a shiny few nickels’ worth of federal spending in his district—but a Republican can no longer get away with being a different man on Saturday night than he is on Sunday morning.
As a result of unforgiving levels of scrutiny of candidates for Congress, the moral standard among successful Republicans has indeed risen. Democrats are, of course, held to a different standard, in part because Republicans do not play the same kind of power-at-all-cost game that Democrats play. Not that Republicans are less interested in power; it is predominantly a matter of who is perceived as the schoolyard bully. Many Republicans, especially in leadership positions, are still more concerned with pleasing the bully than with furthering conservative politics.
Nevertheless, the Republicans have gradually learned to stand up to the Democrats and to accept that they actually can get things done even when the Democrats get off-the-rocker angry about it. This, together with fewer moral trainwrecks in Congress, has increased the likelihood that the Republican majority can indeed get controversial things done in the House.
All in all, it is unlikely but not impossible that the Democrats manage to peel off enough Republicans from Speaker McCarthy’s majority to kill the impeachment inquiry before it is even voted on. Should they fail to do so, and should the House open an inquiry, it will give the investigative committee a strong set of tools. Back to the Breitbart story, which notes that an impeachment inquiry would
provide the House with extraordinary new investigative and law enforcement powers in terms of compelling testimony, enforcing subpoenas, and digging into Biden’s behavior and the culture of corruption surrounding the president.
Once the House has completed its inquiry and voted to actually impeach Biden, the case against him is sent over to the Senate. They formally act as the judge and jury: if 60 of the 100 Senators vote in favor of impeachment, Biden is formally removed from the presidency.
Here is where the process ends. There is virtually no chance that the Senate would vote in favor of an impeachment against Biden, any more than they would have allowed Trump to be removed for the same reason. First of all, the party-line vote would be formidable, with Democrats rallying around Biden more passionately than Republicans did around Trump. Loyalty to the party is far stronger in the Senate than it is in the House. Senators desperately need the party machine to raise money. It is expensive—very expensive—to keep a Senate seat, and those who line one’s pockets have first dibs on one’s vote.
If Democrats allowed their own president to be impeached, it would be a big blow to their fundraising machine—especially after the party made two unsuccessful attempts at doing the same to his Republican predecessor.
A second reason why the Senate will not vote in favor of Biden’s impeachment is that the vote would happen so close to next year’s election. It would overshadow the re-election campaign for the third of the senators who are up for re-election. The political turmoil would upset voter sentiments in all possible directions. Politicians hate uncertainty, especially in election times, and the removal of a president from office only a few months before an election would be the best way to make the election campaign entirely unpredictable.
But does this mean that an impeachment inquiry would stand no chance of removing a highly corrupt president from office?
No, that is not the case. It could actually lead to the downfall of the Biden presidency, but it would happen only through Biden’s own resignation. He would never admit to any wrongdoing of course, but if the evidence from the inquiry is so compelling that people within the circles of power begin to question his usefulness as president, then he will announce his resignation ‘for health reasons.’
We can be cynical about American politics, but there is still a core of integrity within the system. Those who favor a strong U.S. military, either for patriotic reasons or because they receive generous campaign contributions from the defense industry, also know that the U.S. government must be reasonably free from undue foreign influence. If, e.g., Chinese money had bought its way too deep into the power structures in Washington, it would compromise the very institutions that keep the U.S. military strong.
Therefore, if the impeachment inquiry goes far enough, Biden will resign before his first term as president is over, and before there is an impeachment vote in the House.
A second, less likely option is that he responds to the inquiry by withdrawing his candidacy for re-election, and that Kevin McCarthy in return refrains from bringing the final impeachment vote to the House floor. This would be a face saver for the president, and McCarthy might prefer it because he is conflict-averse. However, this option would undermine McCarthy’s support among conservatives in the House. They would question his fortitude and resolve as Speaker.
Whatever happens in the coming months will set the tone for next year’s election. That election, in turn, could turn out to be unlike any other we have seen in the almost 250 years of the American constitutional republic.
Regardless of who you are rooting for, get out the popcorn and enjoy the show.
The Legal Battle for the Next President
Next year’s presidential election here in America could turn out to be the most absurd in the nation’s history.
On the one hand, Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, much like Navalny in Russia, would be under indictment by the justice machine led by his own opponent, the sitting president. On the other hand, Joe Biden, the sitting president himself, could be under impeachment by a Congress led by his opponent’s own party.
There is a fair chance that when we get to about this time next year, neither Trump nor Biden will be on the ballot. However, this is already gearing up to be such an unprecedented presidential campaign that previous experience is of limited use in predicting its outcome. For one, the left still has not been able to establish that their indictments against Trump also make him ineligible to run for president. This opens many absurd scenarios, including one where Trump is found guilty of whatever charge they have thrown at him, goes to jail, wins the presidential election, takes the oath of office, and pardons himself.
But wait—it gets better. Just as his opponent, the sitting president, thought he neutralized Trump, he himself could be removed from office before he even gets a chance to win a second term. Speaking to Breitbart News on Friday September 1st, Speaker of the House Kevin McCartthy explained how the House of Representatives would open a formal impeachment inquiry against President Biden:
The impeachment would be based on substantiated allegations that Joe Biden is corrupt—and corrupt at levels unpalatable even to a political establishment hardened by generations of turning politics into business.
What McCarthy is referring to with his statement about not taking the impeachment issue lightly is the contrast between a formally correct impeachment inquiry and the one that the Democrats launched against President Trump in 2019. In that case, Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi simply proclaimed that an impeachment inquiry had begun; with McCarthy as speaker, it would take a majority of the House of Representatives to start that same process against Biden.
An impeachment inquiry would not necessarily lead to formal impeachment of the president—think of it as an investigation into the probable cause for impeachment. Nevertheless, the very fact that McCarthy is openly talking about it is a serious matter, one that President Biden should take to heart. Kevin McCarthy is a power player more than a principled conservative, but he is also a cautious man. You do not become speaker of the House without securing your pants with both belt and suspenders before you go to work in the morning.
Simply put, McCarthy will not lose an impeachment vote. He will not ask the House of Representatives to vote on an impeachment inquiry without securing a majority beforehand. The very fact that he is talking about it means that he has already begun probing his Republican majority in the House on where they stand, and on what he has to do to secure the right outcome of the vote.
It is a safe bet that he does not yet know if he can get an impeachment inquiry through the House. His statement to Breitbart comes in response to media rumors of impeachment talks among House Republicans, especially those on the conservative side. McCarthy needed to give himself an ‘out’ if he cannot secure 218 votes out of the 435 members of the House. With 222 Republicans, McCarthy can only lose four votes, but even the loss of one would be problematic from a political viewpoint.
There is no doubt that there are reasons to impeach Biden—his corruption has reached problematic levels, even by Washington standards. The problem for McCarthy is to what extent all of the Republicans in the House will have the fortitude to go along with an impeachment vote. Democrats and their affiliates are likely already hard at work to find ways to eliminate McCarthy’s impeachment majority before it even comes to a vote. Therefore, the issue of whether or not Biden will be under formal impeachment inquiry comes down to the ability of Republican Congressmen to stand up to the enormous pressure that Biden supporters will put on them.
There are three ways that such pressure could be applied. First, there is the ‘challenger’ pressure. Democrats could approach Republicans who won their last election by a narrow margin, and let them know that if they vote for an impeachment inquiry, their Democrat opponent in the next election will get a major boost in funding. This type of pressure has worked in the past, but it has lost its appeal in recent decades with the rising levels of tension and outright hostility in many parts of American politics. Today, every race for Congress is hotly contested and receives funding as if the future of the country depended on it.
The second type of pressure is more positive in nature. A member of Congress can be promised a position on the board of a company or an organization, or a lobbying job with a fat paycheck, if he or she simply abstains from voting for the impeachment inquiry. The weaker the mind of the Congressman, the smaller the de facto bribe needed to win him or her over.
For the Democrats, this is a more productive way to put pressure on Republicans—and the other way around. A remarkable number of Congressmen and Senators retire to a luxurious lifestyle after having altruistically sacrificed many years of their lives to public service on a meager paycheck. However, it is also the type of pressure that is easy for allies of Speaker McCarthy to counter: the Republicans are just as good at offering post-Congressional careers to their own people, and to opponents, as the Democrats are.
Third, and most damningly, the Democrats can resort to the scandalous type of pressure. They can simply tell Republicans in Congress that they know all about his tax problems or his adultery. They can let the person in question know that they are aware that he or she has bedroom preferences that are inconsistent with the family values that the good Congressman espoused in the last election.
There was a time when this type of pressure was the easiest to apply of them all. In recent years, the crop of absolutely depraved Congressmen and Senators has shrunk noticeably. It is still easy to find examples of the normal levels of moral feebleness—a fiscal conservative will gladly sell his values for a shiny few nickels’ worth of federal spending in his district—but a Republican can no longer get away with being a different man on Saturday night than he is on Sunday morning.
As a result of unforgiving levels of scrutiny of candidates for Congress, the moral standard among successful Republicans has indeed risen. Democrats are, of course, held to a different standard, in part because Republicans do not play the same kind of power-at-all-cost game that Democrats play. Not that Republicans are less interested in power; it is predominantly a matter of who is perceived as the schoolyard bully. Many Republicans, especially in leadership positions, are still more concerned with pleasing the bully than with furthering conservative politics.
Nevertheless, the Republicans have gradually learned to stand up to the Democrats and to accept that they actually can get things done even when the Democrats get off-the-rocker angry about it. This, together with fewer moral trainwrecks in Congress, has increased the likelihood that the Republican majority can indeed get controversial things done in the House.
All in all, it is unlikely but not impossible that the Democrats manage to peel off enough Republicans from Speaker McCarthy’s majority to kill the impeachment inquiry before it is even voted on. Should they fail to do so, and should the House open an inquiry, it will give the investigative committee a strong set of tools. Back to the Breitbart story, which notes that an impeachment inquiry would
Once the House has completed its inquiry and voted to actually impeach Biden, the case against him is sent over to the Senate. They formally act as the judge and jury: if 60 of the 100 Senators vote in favor of impeachment, Biden is formally removed from the presidency.
Here is where the process ends. There is virtually no chance that the Senate would vote in favor of an impeachment against Biden, any more than they would have allowed Trump to be removed for the same reason. First of all, the party-line vote would be formidable, with Democrats rallying around Biden more passionately than Republicans did around Trump. Loyalty to the party is far stronger in the Senate than it is in the House. Senators desperately need the party machine to raise money. It is expensive—very expensive—to keep a Senate seat, and those who line one’s pockets have first dibs on one’s vote.
If Democrats allowed their own president to be impeached, it would be a big blow to their fundraising machine—especially after the party made two unsuccessful attempts at doing the same to his Republican predecessor.
A second reason why the Senate will not vote in favor of Biden’s impeachment is that the vote would happen so close to next year’s election. It would overshadow the re-election campaign for the third of the senators who are up for re-election. The political turmoil would upset voter sentiments in all possible directions. Politicians hate uncertainty, especially in election times, and the removal of a president from office only a few months before an election would be the best way to make the election campaign entirely unpredictable.
But does this mean that an impeachment inquiry would stand no chance of removing a highly corrupt president from office?
No, that is not the case. It could actually lead to the downfall of the Biden presidency, but it would happen only through Biden’s own resignation. He would never admit to any wrongdoing of course, but if the evidence from the inquiry is so compelling that people within the circles of power begin to question his usefulness as president, then he will announce his resignation ‘for health reasons.’
We can be cynical about American politics, but there is still a core of integrity within the system. Those who favor a strong U.S. military, either for patriotic reasons or because they receive generous campaign contributions from the defense industry, also know that the U.S. government must be reasonably free from undue foreign influence. If, e.g., Chinese money had bought its way too deep into the power structures in Washington, it would compromise the very institutions that keep the U.S. military strong.
Therefore, if the impeachment inquiry goes far enough, Biden will resign before his first term as president is over, and before there is an impeachment vote in the House.
A second, less likely option is that he responds to the inquiry by withdrawing his candidacy for re-election, and that Kevin McCarthy in return refrains from bringing the final impeachment vote to the House floor. This would be a face saver for the president, and McCarthy might prefer it because he is conflict-averse. However, this option would undermine McCarthy’s support among conservatives in the House. They would question his fortitude and resolve as Speaker.
Whatever happens in the coming months will set the tone for next year’s election. That election, in turn, could turn out to be unlike any other we have seen in the almost 250 years of the American constitutional republic.
Regardless of who you are rooting for, get out the popcorn and enjoy the show.
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