Robert Reich: Trump’s Bonkers Plan To Impeach Biden – OpEd
By Robert Reich
Speaker Kevin McCarthy plans to get an impeachment of Joe Biden underway in the House by the end of September.
But McCarthy faces two problems. First, there are no grounds for impeachment — no evidence, for example, that Biden got money or agreed to do anything so his son, Hunter, could get money. Or any other grounds.
Second, McCarthy doesn’t have the votes of moderate Republicans, whose constituents don’t want the House to waste time and money impeaching Biden.
So what’s McCarthy going to do? Open the inquiry anyway, without a formal vote.
McCarthy wants to start an impeachment of Biden because Trump is pressuring him to. As Trump posted Sunday:
“The Republicans in Congress, though well meaning, keep talking about an Impeachment ‘Inquiry’ on Crooked Joe Biden. Biden is a Stone Cold Crook-You don’t need a long INQUIRY to prove it, it’s already proven… Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION.”
Why is Trump so eager to get a Biden impeachment underway? Not to retaliate against the Democrats for impeaching him. It’s mainly to have Biden impeachment stories run at the same time as Trump trial stories. That way, Trump and his Republican enablers can deflect attention from the trials and confuse the public with arguments that Biden is even more guilty of something.
It’s part of a broader Republican strategy to defend Trump during his coming trials not by claiming he’s innocent but by launching investigations to tarnish Biden — similar to the strategy Republicans used investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016 and tried to use when Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden in 2019.
Deflection, confusion, and baseless lies repeated on social media, then magnified by Fox News and expanded on by Newsmax and other extremist outlets. Sound familiar?
I doubt Americans will fall for it.
On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced the first 10 drugs whose prices will be negotiated downward under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which gave Medicare such power. This is a big deal. Last year, Medicare enrollees paid $3.4 billion in out-of-pocket expenses for these drugs. The savings will be considerable.
So while Biden delivers practical solutions to the problems facing Americans, such as high drug costs, Republicans engage in partisan stunts like impeaching Biden. Even though Democrats are terrible at messaging, the contrast should be obvious to everyone.
What do you think?
This article was published at Robert Reich’s Substack
