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The House Republicans’ big plans to impeach President Joe Biden have imploded, forcing them to acknowledge they don’t have the votes to impeach on the flimsy evidence they’ve scraped together. So they’re trying to figure out how to make 14 months of wasted time investigating Biden look like it was serious, and have come up with the idea of packaging it all up in a criminal referral and sending it to the Department of Justice.
That’s coming straight from House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer’s mouth. You know Comer, the hapless bumbler who admitted last spring that he couldn’t find any Biden crimes, but kept on “investigating” anyway, only to see all those months of nonsense blown out of the water when it was revealed last month that one of his star witnesses was being fed false information by Russian agents.
So it’s time to pivot. “At the end of the day, what does accountability look like? It looks like criminal referrals,” Comer recently told Fox New host Sean Hannity. “It looks like referring people to the Department of Justice. … If Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice won’t take any potential criminal referrals seriously, then maybe the next president, with a new attorney general, will.”
This new strategy seems to come at the direction of Donald Trump, who’d love to have locking Biden up as a central campaign theme this year. Comer’s interview with Hannity came shortly after Comer just so happened to run into Trump while having lunch with Trump donor Vernon Hill at one of Trump’s Florida properties. What a coincidence they bumped into each other!
It certainly wouldn’t be the first time Republicans took their marching orders from Trump. One MAGA lawmaker, Texas Rep. Troy Nehls, even admitted that the motivation for him on impeachment was to give Trump “a little bit of ammo to fire back” at Biden in this year’s presidential race. Just like how Republicans killed the Senate’s bipartisan immigration bill, on Trump’s orders.
House Speaker Mike Johnson confirms they are talking about criminal referrals, but he won’t commit to it. He told CNN he’s just been too busy to keep up with the investigations. “To be very frank with you, very honest and transparent because I’ve been so busy with all my other responsibilities, I have not been able to take the time to do the deep dive in the evidence, but what has been uncovered is alarming,” but that there’s “more deliberation to be done on it that’s for sure.”
There sure is. The decision to make a criminal referral against a sitting president—knowing that the Department of Justice would almost certainly have to defer it—isn’t something all Republicans relish. Even the hard-line conservative and very shady California Rep. Darrell Issa is throwing cold water on the idea, telling The New York Times, “We don’t refer a seated president for criminal charges.” He added that maybe they could make criminal referrals for Biden family members, “but most of what we’ve discovered they already knew.”
Vulnerable Republicans, whom Johnson desperately needs to keep the House majority, likely want to distance themselves from the whole thing. One of them, Rep. Nick LaLota of New York, told CNN that he has way more important things to deal with. “I’m focused on five or 10 things other than that right now,” he said.
What happens next will have to be decided by the whole conference, and Johnson is going to have to lead. With Trump and MAGA members pressing for criminal referrals and plenty in the conference just wanting to forget the whole thing, it’s going to cause even more dissension in the ranks.
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The ripple effects of the Dobbs decision are impacting not only the right to an abortion but also abortion funding, IVF, and even recreational sex. Joining us on this week’s episode of “The Downballot” is Grace Panetta, a political reporter at The 19th who has closely covered the electoral consequences of this ever-widening set of issues. Panetta highlights key races this year where reproductive rights will take center stage, including ballot initiatives in multiple states, efforts to repeal bans on public funding of abortions, and an upcoming special election in Alabama, the state that just thrust IVF into the limelight.
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