Dem
51
GOP
49
In case you thought the Republicans in the House were busy legislating—writing a bill to ban abortion nationwide, allocating funds to beef up border security, or drawing up a constitutional amendment to cancel Art. I, Sec. 9. Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, perhaps—how wrong you were. They have no interest even in show legislation, let alone working with the Senate Democrats to actually pass laws. No, all they care about is grandstanding with their base to show how much they hate Joe Biden. Now that the key witness in the case to impeach Biden turns out to be a Russian stooge, they need a Plan B. Or a Plan C. Or, if they get desperate, maybe a plan X. Of course, that would probably set off the app on Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-LA) phone.
Plan B seems to focus on finding a way to connect Hunter Biden's somewhat iffy business practices and work as a not-quite-top-of-the-line artist to his Dad. The problem is that there isn't any connection. While Hunter's life is clearly not as pure as the driven snow, he doesn't hold public office and he didn't rope Dad into any of his schemes. To the extent that he took a Ukrainian energy company for suckers and extracted a lot of money and gave them nothing in return, that is something Donald Trump should probably cheer about. What a clever businessman!
Plan C seems to be about actually passing laws—laws about tough financial disclosure for presidents and family members and changes to the rules about working for foreign countries. Also laws about handling classified documents. We humbly suggest the former could be entitled the "Jared Kushner Financial Disclosure Act" and the latter could be entitled "The Donald Trump Act for Handling Classified Documents." However, we are not confident either of these bills could get any Republican votes in the House, even though all the Democrats would probably sign on.
Plan D is referring Hunter Biden to the DoJ because, well, the base would like that even though the DoJ has no obligation to act on such referrals and surely would not in this case because the Republicans can't supply a whit of evidence that Hunter committed any crimes, beyond those he's already charged with (and will face trial for starting on June 3).
But doing nothing could be painful. The angry base is demanding someone's head on a pike and impeaching DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas isn't going to do the job because the base can't pronounce his name and doesn't know who he is.
Some House members want a vote on impeaching Biden to soothe the mob, even if they know it will fail. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) said: "Instead of losing every time by surrender, I would rather try, fight and if you lose some you lose some, but you have a chance to win." However, in this case, the chance of winning (by which he means a mere impeachment, since conviction is out of the question) is basically zero because the Biden 17 aren't going to commit political hara-kiri to please the base. (V)