Senate Republicans are softening their public criticism of the House effort to impeach President Biden after largely panning the idea earlier this year.
While a number of Senate Republicans aren’t keen on holding a Biden impeachment trial, they aren’t actively dissuading the House from holding a vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry.
It’s a step that new House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is proceeding toward, and one that his predecessor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), avoided.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell’s (Ky.) leadership team, on Monday defended a floor vote on authorizing the impeachment as something that would give House Republican-led committees more leverage over Biden’s legal team in court.
“My understanding is the White House is stonewalling some of the subpoenas, and if there’s an impeachment inquiry underway, I think that provides a better position if you go to court to demonstrate a legitimate legislative purpose,” said Cornyn, effectively echoing some of the arguments House Republicans have made for an inquiry vote with his remarks.
Earlier this year, Cornyn questioned the political wisdom of passing articles of impeachment without clear evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors.
Johnson, in making the case for a vote on an inquiry, says the entire chamber needs to vote on moving forward with impeachment proceedings because House investigators are being “stonewalled” by the White House.
“It’s become a necessary step,” Johnson told “Fox & Friends Weekend” during an interview alongside House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.)
The White House on Friday pushed back on claims of obstruction from House Republicans by releasing a memo pointing out that GOP investigators have had access to more than 35,000 pages of private financial records, more than 2,000 pages of Treasury Department financial reports and more than 36 hours of witness testimony, including from Attorney General Merrick Garland.
House GOP investigators have also received Biden’s vice presidential records from the National Archives and documents and witness testimony from the FBI, Department of Justice and Treasury Department.
To an extent, the softening message from key Senate Republicans reflects the latitude they’re willing to give Johnson ahead of major negotiations on defense and spending.
GOP senators also aren’t looking to pick a fight with House conservatives over the political wisdom of formally voting for an impeachment inquiry — despite the lack of clear evidence that Biden committed high crimes or misdemeanors.
Senate Republican Conference Vice Chair Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) declined to comment Monday on whether Senate Republicans think it’s a good idea to ratchet up impeachment proceedings to a higher level of intensity.
“We should let the House do what — I don’t know what they’re going to do. I’d rather face those questions when and if” they vote on impeachment, she said, “rather than what they might or might not do.”
“I’m not going to make any comment on it. Whatever they do is what they’re going to do and then I’ll be ready to comment after they make their decision,” she said.
In September, Capito said there was “very little appetite for a third impeachment trial” in the Senate, echoing similar comments by other Republican senators at the time.
Some Republicans in the Senate have been more vocal in backing moving forward with impeachment.
National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who has endorsed former President Trump in the 2024 race, urged the House to move forward with a vote to give more formal status to the impeachment inquiry.
“They should proceed,” he said as he walked into a Monday Senate GOP leadership meeting.
Trump, the front-runner for his party’s presidential nomination next year, himself warned Republican lawmakers over the summer that if they don’t “act on Democratic fraud” they should be “immediately primaried.”
Johnson’s decision to move toward a vote in an inquiry is a break with McCarthy’s strategy of directing House committees in September to launch inquiries without a floor vote.
Like McCarthy, Johnson faces his own political difficulties in the House on such a vote.
He’s clinging to a narrow majority that grew one vote smaller last week when the House voted to expel Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) over the “no” votes of Johnson and his leadership team.
House Republicans representing districts won by Biden have been less than keen on backing impeachment votes, and it’s unclear whether a vote to formally open an inquiry would pass over Democratic opposition.
Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2-ranking member of Senate GOP leadership, warned Monday that any articles of impeachment produced by the House would be dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
“It’s a high bar you have to hit, and my assumption is in a Democrat Senate it would be very hard to get actually a trial conducted. I’m sure the Democrats would figure out a way to kill it,” he said.
But at the same time, Thune did not voice the same skepticism as he did in January, when he expressed worry that impeachment proceedings could become “a tit for tat” where “every two years or four years you’re dealing with impeachment proceedings in the House and Senate.”
“I think they’re going to hopefully follow where the facts go. Oversight is a legitimate role of the Congress,” he said.
Thune in September warned that impeaching proceedings would not “be advantageous if this thing went further, with all the other things we have to do.”
McConnell made it clear earlier this year that he thought Republicans in Congress should focus on getting the annual funding bills passed along with the other responsibilities of governing without wading into an impeachment battle with no clear exit strategy.
“Impeachment ought to be rare,” he told The New York Times in August. “This is not good for the country.”
But he has since reined in his vocal skepticism, telling reporters in September that he would not give the Speaker, who was McCarthy at the time, “any advice from the Senate on how to run the House.”
House Republicans on Monday touted subpoenaed financial records that show the president received payments from a business account linked to his son, Hunter, whose business dealings are the focus of the House impeachment inquiry.
But Hunter Biden’s legal counsel, Abbe Lowell, said the payments were reimbursements for truck financing payments that the president covered while his son was between jobs and struggling to secure credit.
“The truth is Hunter’s father helped him when he was struggling financially due to his addiction and could not secure credit to finance a truck,” Lowell said in a statement. “When Hunter was able to, he paid his father back and took over the payments himself.”
Emily Brooks contributed.