Striking Back

Former President Donald Trump has “no idea” whether Republicans will vote to impeach President Joe Biden.

But he does have a theory on what motivated House Republicans to launch a Biden impeachment inquiry: revenge.
‘They did it to me’: Trump says Biden impeachment inquiry might be motivated by revenge

I’m going to disagree with this assessment, as much as I think that a lot of people believe it to be true. Because I don’t think that simple vengefulness is what’s in play here. Partisanship makes much more sense. Sure, House Speaker McCarthy is using the fact that Representative Nancy Pelosi, the previous Speaker, opened her impeachment inquiries against Donald Trump without holding a vote first, but the idea that this line of attack against President Biden wouldn’t have occurred to anyone had Representative Pelosi not done it first is fairly ludicrous.

Speaker McCarthy does have some work to do to keep the Freedom Caucus and those sorts appeased. And there is a case to be made that he’s offering up this impeachment inquiry to do just that. Whether it will work is another matter entirely. But what’s much less in doubt is that fact that many Republican voters (and, it appears, a decent number of Republicans in Congress) think that President Biden has done something wrong. Given the dearth of evidence of crimes thus far, that may be the conflation of partisanship with morality speaking, but that’s something that’s worth keeping in mind on its own.

As the two major political parties have drifted even farther apart from one another, people see their partisan allegiances as being less about personal preference than they are reflections of being right thinking and having the nation’s interests at heart. Given this, I don’t buy into the presumption that had the Democrats been unwilling to impeach Donald Trump (knowing they had no chance of obtaining a conviction in the Senate) that House Republicans wouldn’t be feeling any pressure to make life difficult for Joe Biden. After all, the percentage of Republicans polled who approve of President Biden’s handling of the office was in the single digits last year(https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/08/09/rising-partisan-antipathy-widening-party-gap-in-presidential-job-approval/), and I suspect it hasn’t gotten any better in the interim. It’s difficult to imagine that anything that Democrats could have done, or held off from doing, during the Trump administration would change that. After all, Democrats and Republicans alike tend to see the other as unethical, busibody extremists. And about 27% of the population feels that neither of the two parties governs honestly and ethically.

Given these factors, even had nothing of the sort been floated when Donald Trump was in office, I suspect that we’d still be looking at a push to impeach President Biden now. Partisan animosity makes charges of wrongdoing much easier to believe, much easier to see as being part of a pattern of bad behavior and much easier to consider only the tip of an iceberg of wrongdoing that will become visible with a little work. If one understands that partisans tend to see their opposite numbers as more closed-minded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent than other Americans (i.e., themselves) it stands to reason that the idea that President Biden has committed at least one impeachable offense would be relatively widespread among Republicans. And given that the entire House is up for election every two years, I suspect that many Representatives realize that if they aren’t convinced of the evils of the other party, someone who is will mount a primary challenge for their seat. That alone is enough of an incentive to seek the ouster of the President.