IMPEACHING JOE BIDEN. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) said she will bring articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden to the House floor and that she will do it in a way, a parliamentary maneuver called a privileged motion, that will force the House to take a vote on it. Boebert's effort to impeach the president focuses on his mishandling of the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.
"Tonight, I brought a privileged motion to the floor that will force a vote on the impeachment of Joe Biden," Boebert tweeted Tuesday night. "The American people can no longer be subjected to a president who refuses to secure our borders. His open border agenda has put every American at greater risk, allowed human traffickers to thrive and given the cartel a free pass. He is not fit to remain as commander-in-chief."
This is the second time Boebert has brought articles of impeachment against Biden. The first was on Sept. 24, 2021, when she focused on Biden's disastrous direction of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. There was never a vote on those articles. Now, Boebert says she will get one.
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The White House denounced the move, Democrats rolled their eyes, and House Republican leaders are trying to stop Boebert. But the fact is, impeachment, once extremely rare, has become an increasingly regular part of American political battling.
There was one impeachment in the first 200 years of U.S. history. There have been three in the last 25 years. Something has changed.
Boebert has a recent model for what she is doing, and that model is Rep. Al Green (D-TX), who worked tirelessly to impeach former President Donald Trump until he finally succeeded.
The story is told in detail in my book Obsession. Green first filed articles of impeachment against Trump on May 17, 2017, when the president had been in office just under four months. Green's articles were a mishmash of liberal complaints against Trump, starting with the president's firing of FBI Director James Comey but growing to include what Democrats called Trump's "Muslim ban," Trump's reaction to Charlottesville, and even Trump's criticism of then-NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.
"I don't think anybody on our side took it seriously," then-Rep. Doug Collins, a top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told me. "Because it was Al Green. I don't mean that disrespectfully, but Al had been threatening to do it for several weeks."
Green's was not an entirely lonely crusade. He had several House Democrats supporting him along the way. As the days passed, Reps. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), Brad Sherman (D-CA), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Steve Cohen (D-TN), and Jamie Raskin (D-MD) joined in support. Nevertheless, Green was not able to get enough support to get a vote on the articles in the then-Republican-controlled House.
Then Green tried what Boebert is trying today — the privileged motion. On Dec. 6, 2017, with Trump in office for less than a year, the House voted on Green's impeachment articles. Of course, they failed, but the articles got 58 votes — roughly a third of the entire House Democratic conference. And some big names voted to impeach Trump at that early date, including the late Rep. John Lewis, a Democratic superstar, and Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), part of the House minority leadership.
Republicans were shocked that the number was so high. "When the president criticized NFL players who kneeled during the pledge — they actually had that as an article of impeachment!" a rattled Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told me. "Like, over 50 Democrats voted to impeach the president over criticizing NFL players."
Green was a little shocked, too, by his own success. But he knew he had started something. "Just stay tuned," he said. "I assure you, that's not the last vote to impeach." And indeed, it wasn't.
There were later votes that picked up a few more Democrats. Then, when Democrats took over the House in the 2018 elections, there was an informal impeachment caucus already in place. They just had to wait for the right time. They hoped to impeach Trump after the release of the Mueller report, which they assumed would be damning. But when Mueller turned out to be a dud, they ended up arguing among themselves about what to do. Then the Ukraine matter arose, and they pulled the trigger quickly in the fall of 2019.
The point was, many Democrats wanted to impeach Trump from the very first moments of his presidency. They started early and small. But they were building momentum for the right moment. It didn't really matter what the issue would be — they wanted to impeach Trump. That could be what Boebert and her like-minded Republican colleagues are doing today.
Was impeachment of Trump justified in 2019? This sounds cynical, but it didn't really matter. Democrats were determined to do it. And, of course, they did it again in 2021, even though it meant holding a Senate trial, probably unconstitutionally, after Trump had left office.
So now, is impeachment of Biden justified? Again, it doesn't really matter. Impeachment is no longer a weapon of last resort.
One can argue that it was Republicans who opened the whole can of worms in 1998 when they impeached Bill Clinton — the first impeachment since Andrew Johnson in 1868. That is, in fact, true. But it is also true that in 1998 GOP lawmakers followed the old model of an outside investigator, independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who produced reams of meticulously gathered evidence for impeachment proceedings that recognized the rights of minority lawmakers. With Trump, Democrats threw all that out the window and raced full speed ahead.
So now there is talk, still in the early stages, of impeaching Biden. Many people will undoubtedly wonder why some Republicans are doing it. The answer is, they are just following a new but already well-worn path.
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