Joe Biden Brushes Off Kevin McCarthy’s Impeachment Stunt: “I’ve Got A Job To Do”

In his first comments on the evidence-free impeachment inquiry Kevin McCarthy announced earlier this week, President Joe Biden dismissed the effort as a political stunt undertaken by Republicans who “want to shut down the government.”

“I got a job to do,” Biden said at a Virginia fundraiser Wednesday evening. “I get up every day—not a joke—not focused on impeachment. I’ve got a job to do. I’ve got to deal with the issues that affect the American people every single solitary day.”

McCarthy, whose speakership appears to be in jeopardy amid a bitter spending fight on Capitol Hill, caved to pressure from his right flank on Tuesday and formally green-lit the impeachment inquiry members like Marjorie Taylor Greene have been clamoring for since Republicans assumed their narrow House majority in January. “There are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction, and corruption,” McCarthy said, “and they warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives.” But Republicans have not produced any evidence to back up their corruption claims, beyond a lot of innuendo and speculation on Fox News. And for what it’s worth, the ugly political exercise has not appeared to improve McCarthy’s position much with the far-right of his conference. He is “not in compliance with the agreement” he struck to assume the gavel earlier this year, as Florida Republican Matt Gaetz told my colleague Abigail Tracy Wednesday, saying he’d still raise a motion to vacate if McCarthy didn’t accede to GOP demands—impeachment or no impeachment.

With the Republican conference still at loggerheads, Biden and the White House—which has been preparing for this inevitable impeachment push for a year now—are seeking to wield McCarthy’s inquiry to their advantage, casting the GOP as more concerned with avenging Donald Trump than actually governing: “This inquiry is theater,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a fundraising email this week, noting that Trump himself had been pushing Republican lawmakers to take up the proceedings. “Theater with bad actors.”

That’s true—but this sideshow is still plenty dangerous. Nearly two-thirds of respondents in a CNN poll last week said they believed the president had some involvement in Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings. Which suggests that Republicans could succeed in using the inquiry to smear Biden the way they used the Benghazi investigation to drag down Hillary Clinton in the 2016 cycle—regardless of whether he did anything wrong. (Incidentally, McCarthy’s accidental admission to Sean Hannity that the Benghazi hearings were intended to damage Clinton cost him the speakership back then.)

Even if it doesn’t hurt Biden in the 2024 race, McCarthy’s unilateral move has already served to cheapen the impeachment process. Democrats impeached Trump for attempting to extort an ally for political gain and then for inciting a deadly attack on the Capitol in a last-ditch effort to cling to power in 2021—“high crimes and misdemeanors” by any reasonable measure. But Biden? It has nothing to do with the “culture of corruption” in the administration, as McCarthy claims, and everything to do with the speaker’s own struggle to remain the ringleader of this far-right circus. “This is a big deal, an impeachment,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on MSNBC Thursday, after McCarthy cited her impeachment of Trump as precedent for his decision to order impeachment proceedings without putting it to a vote. “You have to do it with care and not on impulse.”