Dem
51
GOP
49
The House GOP has a resolution calling for a Joe Biden impeachment inquiry, and now Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) thinks he has the votes to approve the resolution. A vote is scheduled for tomorrow.
With such a thin margin for error, nothing is official until it's official, of course. But clearly, most or all of the Biden 17 (down from 18 having lost "Santos") have fallen into line, despite previous skepticism about the plan. We are having trouble figuring out what changed. It's possible that Johnson threatened them behind the scenes ("How would you like to be reassigned to the House Committee on Keeping the Toilets Clean?"). It's possible that they need to throw some red meat to Republican voters in their districts. It's possible that they see the writing on the wall, and they want to let this run its course before next year's elections. We really don't know.
Officially, the reason the Republicans are formalizing things is that a formal inquiry will lead to more cooperation from the White House. Nobody can possibly take this explanation seriously, however. First of all, how much cooperation did the 1/6 Committee get from Team Trump once it was conducting an official, full-fledged investigation? Second, this whole impeachment inquiry is based on the fantasy that Joe Biden was involved with Hunter Biden's shady business dealings. Because it is a fantasy, there hasn't been a shred of evidence that it's true, because that evidence doesn't exist. Making the inquiry "official" isn't magically going to cause that evidence to spring into existence, any more than it's going to make unicorns real, or make Crocs fashionable, or make the Chicago Bears a Super Bowl contender.
So, what's really going on here? With 218 or so votes for an inquiry, we'd guess there are several different motivations. Some members are presumably true believers who think that somehow, some way, this will produce an actual impeachment, and will embarrass Biden. More savvy members presumably hope that an ongoing inquiry will create a general impression of Biden-as-criminal, particularly among those voters who don't pay THAT much attention, and who don't ask too many questions. There are surely also some members whose primary goal is to genuflect before King Donald I, since he badly wants to "even the score" with Biden. The only thing that would make His Majesty happier is if the House can somehow find a way to impeach Barack Obama and/or Hillary Clinton.
In (Z)'s lecture on Gilded Age politics and political machines, he says something like, "When Americans elect someone as mayor, or governor, or president, or whatever, those people are given various 'resources' to expend on the voters' behalf—tax revenue, government jobs, the right to pass laws, etc. The expectation is that the politicians will use those resources in a way that will make people's lives better. But that's not the only option; sometimes the politicians use the resources in a manner that primarily benefits themselves and their friends. That, in a nutshell, is the 'spoils system.'"
Forgive us for saying so, but while Republicans on the national and state levels seem to be very busy these days (see this item, and the previous two), is there anything here that is going to make even a single voter's life better? Indeed, can you think of any project the Republicans are working on these days that will benefit the general public, or some subset thereof? If there are answers to that question, there aren't many of them, as far as we can tell, and we write about politics every single day. It isn't quite the same as the spoils system of the Gilded Age, but more and more it's hard to avoid the conclusion that we've entered the era of spoils system v2.0. (Z)