After months with no significant findings, the GOP effort to impeach President Joe Biden seems to be flailing.
But House Republicans are plowing ahead. There’s a hearing scheduled in House Oversight on Wednesday on “Examining Joe Biden’s Abuse of Public Office.” And Speaker Mike Johnson’s office blasted the White House for suggesting the House shut down its impeachment efforts.
“The White House does not get to decide how impeachment gets resolved; that is for Congress to decide,” Johnson spokesperson Raj Shah said in a statement.
White House counsel Ed Siskel sent a letter to House GOP leaders last week calling for them to “move on” from impeachment. He sent the letter to the speaker and leaders on House committees on Judiciary and Oversight.
The next evening, Biden turned the matter into a joke.
“The biggest joke of the night: an impeachment inquiry,” Biden quipped at the Gridiron dinner on Saturday. “Imagine believing something so baseless that has a zero chance of succeeding. But Republicans would rather fail at impeachment than succeed at anything else.”
Spokespersons for the Oversight and Judiciary committees did not respond to a request for comment.
Appetite for impeachment may be slowing within the conference. The House has struggled to pass much at all, and impeachment of the president would be an incredibly heavy lift with such a slim majority. Even the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas initially failed in a House vote and then stalled out after its passage.
Ralph Norman, who remains steadfast in saying that Biden deserves to be impeached, told Politico it might be time to move the party’s political force elsewhere.
“He deserves to be impeached with the information we have now, but let’s be realistic — this is March. The election is in November,” Norman said last week. “You save your gunpowder at some point. You saw the trouble we had on Mayorkas.”
Rep. Troy Nehls, who also supports impeachment, shared a similar sentiment with CNN.
“We are eight months away from a presidential election,” he said last week. “We’ve done our job and laid a good case out there. Let’s move on. Our focus should be on getting Donald Trump elected.”
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Casey Murray is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.