House Republican leaders moved to defang an effort from Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) to impeach President Biden, after the unexpected fight exposed sharp divisions within the GOP over how aggressively to confront their adversary in the White House.
The House Rules Committee met on Wednesday evening to craft a rule that will refer Boebert’s resolution to impeach Biden to the House Homeland Security and Judiciary committees. Boebert’s resolution cited Biden’s handling of the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration as grounds for impeachment.
“Speaker McCarthy and House Republicans are committed to fulfilling regular order and undertaking investigations prior to taking up the serious constitutional duty of impeachment,” House Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said in the hearing.
A formal vote on the rule to re-refer Boebert’s resolution will occur on Thursday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said.
Before GOP leadership moved to craft the new rule, House Democrats had planned to make a motion to table the resolution, essentially killing it. Such a motion would not be in order for the rule, stripping Democrats of the opportunity to defend Biden amid an impeachment threat.
It also protects Republicans from taking a potentially politically tricky vote. Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) said earlier on Wednesday that Republicans who voted to table the impeachment articles could face attacks based on that vote in primaries.
Boebert’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the rule to refer her resolution to the committees.
Boebert’s privileged motion on Tuesday, forcing action on her impeachment resolution this week, caught GOP leaders by surprise and sparked rare public pushback from Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), as well as immediate rebukes from scores of fellow Republicans.
The critics warned that the formal move to oust Biden is wildly premature, harming the Republicans’ ongoing efforts to investigate the president on a range of issues — from public policy to personal finances — while undermining potential impeachment efforts in the future.
At a closed-door meeting of the House GOP conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, McCarthy took the remarkable step of urging his troops to oppose the impeachment resolution when it hits the floor later in the week, a House Republican told The Hill.
“This is one of the most serious things you can do as a member of Congress. I think you’ve got to go through the process. You’ve got to have the investigation,” McCarthy later said. “And throwing something on the floor actually harms the investigation that we’re doing right now.”
McCarthy told reporters he called Boebert on Tuesday and asked her to address the issue at Wednesday’s conference meeting before moving to force a vote. Boebert told McCarthy she would think about it, according to the Speaker, but then she went ahead and made the privileged motion on Tuesday anyway.
At Wednesday’s meeting, the Colorado Republican did not show up.
Boebert instead appeared on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s show Wednesday morning, defending her move to force a vote on impeachment despite the opposition from her leadership.
“I would love for committees to do the work, but I haven’t seen the work be done on this particular subject,” Boebert said. She later said there are not enough GOP votes to pass impeachment articles out of committee.
“This, I’m hoping, generates enthusiasm with the base to contact their members of Congress and say, ‘We want something done while you have the majority,’” Boebert said.
Boebert’s move derailed the GOP focus on other Biden-focused criticism. Lawmakers had been eager to keep the spotlight on the president’s son Hunter Biden agreeing to a plea deal involving federal tax and gun charges.
And her GOP critics, while no fans of the president, said the move fractures the GOP at a crucial political moment while jumping ahead of the various probes into Biden’s White House.
“It’s a person thinking about themselves instead of the team,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who emphasized the importance of conducting hearings before voting on something as momentous as ousting a sitting president. Bacon represents a district Biden carried in 2020.
Republicans spent years hammering Democrats for what they said were a pair of thinly-argued impeachments of Trump, and many warned that Boebert’s impeachment effort — which sidesteps all committee action — follows in the same flawed mold.
“I feel like it was cheapened in the last Congress; we shouldn’t follow the same footprints,” Bacon said.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said he prefers to see any impeachment effort later go through the House Judiciary Committee, as his panel probes a swath of issues — from Biden’s handling of the U.S.-Mexico border to the foreign business dealings by the president’s family members.
“In five months, I think we’ve produced a lot of information,” Comer said “This is gonna take, you know, many more months, unfortunately. The FBI is fighting us, the DOJ is fighting us, big money lawyers are fighting us. I think we’re going as fast as we can.”
When it comes to border issues, Comer said he is more in favor of starting with building a case against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas first.
Most House Republicans hungry for retribution over the U.S.-Mexico border have focused on Mayorkas rather than Biden. Last week, the House GOP launched an investigation that could serve as the basis of an eventual Mayorkas impeachment.
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) also said he would prefer impeachments to go through his committee, though was not necessarily opposed to impeaching Biden.
“I think there’s a better way to do it,” Jordan said.
Democrats plan to make a motion to table Boebert’s impeachment resolution, essentially killing it. And many Republicans said they’re ready to support the Democratic measure.
Boebert is one of four members who have led articles of impeachment against Biden this year, with each one pointing to Biden’s handling of the border and immigration issues.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has had public dust-ups with Boebert in the past, accused Boebert of copying her impeachment push.
“I had already introduced articles of impeachment on Joe Biden for the border, asked her to co-sponsor mine, she didn’t. She basically copied my articles and then introduced them and then changed them to a privileged resolution,” Greene said. “So of course I support ’em because they’re identical to mine.”
“They’re basically a copycat,” she added.
Greene added that GOP members were mad at Boebert because her privileged motion “came out of nowhere.”
More privileged resolutions on impeachment could be coming. Greene said she will convert all her impeachment articles against Biden and top figures in his administration into privileged resolutions to use “when I feel it’s necessary.”
Amid the pushback, some conservatives defended Boebert’s strategy, even though it would circumvent the conventional committee process they demanded of GOP leaders this year.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) — the chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus who was one of several Republicans to push for regular order during the drawn-out Speaker’s race in January — argued that lawmakers were not trying to circumvent the process by bringing up privileged resolutions.
“Regular order also includes individual members being able to represent their districts,” Perry said. “[It] might not be what I do, but if that’s what they see as necessary, then that’s their prerogative.”