Impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden in the US Congress is unlikely to yield results

Speaker of the US House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy supported the opening of an investigation as part of the impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden. There are practically no prospects for completing the procedure until the head of state resigns, but the process itself will become an important part of the Republicans’ campaign to discredit the current president

As Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said on September 12, Biden “lied to the American people” that he was not aware of the foreign business transactions of his family members. “I have therefore directed the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees to begin an impeachment review of President Joe Biden,” he said.

Rumors about family members of the current president using his position to achieve personal goals have been circulating in the media for several years. His son Hunter’s activities in Ukraine were widely publicized when Biden Sr. was vice president in the administration of President Barack Obama (2009–2017). Hunter Biden joined the board of directors of the gas production company Burisma (developing fields in the Dnieper-Donetsk, Carpathian and Azov basins) in 2014. In 2016, Joe Biden, in order to protect his son, put pressure on Kiev to fire the country’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who initiated the criminal case regarding Burisma management. Since 2014, it was Biden who oversaw the Ukrainian foreign policy direction of the Obama administration.

Biden himself has repeatedly denied his personal involvement in the Burisma case and even insisted that he did not discuss his business deals with his son. However, in April 2022, The New York Post published an article claiming that Biden used the pseudonyms Robin Ware, Robert L. Peters and JRB Ware in correspondence with his son and informed about the situation with Shokin and Burisma. In August 2023, the head of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, who is investigating the Biden affair, formally asked the National Archives to provide congressmen with access to correspondence to verify this information.

Republican threats to launch an impeachment investigation come as the 2024 presidential campaign begins, with the president’s approval ratings down to 39% in a September CNN poll. In addition, as the American publication The Hill writes, 69% of Democrats consider Biden too old to participate in the elections, but at the same time 82% of the president’s party members plan to support him if he is the party’s candidate.

According to the US Constitution, impeachment can only be carried out if the usual majority in the House of Representatives and a supermajority (67 people) in the Senate vote in favor, but Republicans in the Senate have only 49 votes, making Biden’s removal almost impossible. In the history of the United States, there has not been a single impeachment proceeding that has resulted in a president being removed from office or resigning. In the case of Richard Nixon in 1974, it did not even come to a vote in the House of Representatives, since he resigned some time before it. Three other presidents have been impeached: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021. In 2019, they tried to accuse Trump of abusing his powers to obtain information about Biden’s corruption in Ukraine, and in the second case, in 2021, of inciting an insurrection, which the initiators considered to be the storming of the Capitol.

Republicans have only 222 seats in the House of Representatives, i.e., a majority of only five seats, but their position is fragile – moderate Republicans opposed to Trump may not vote for impeachment. If there are at least five of them, the procedure will fail, which is politically disadvantageous for McCarthy, says political scientist Jan Veselov. McCarthy was probably forced to announce the start of the investigation because of a threat from a small group of the most conservative Republicans, the Freedom Caucus, who were putting pressure on him. When elected in January, McCarthy made a series of promises to them on budget policy and other issues, agreeing to changes to the procedure for recalling the speaker. Now, to vote to remove the speaker from office, a statement from just one disgruntled congressman is enough. And conservatives are actively threatening McCarthy that if he doesn’t start impeachment, they will remove him himself, Veselov says.

Republicans do not hope to remove Biden from office; their main goal is to gain greater access to information about him, says Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of the Center for Comprehensive and European Studies at the Higher School of Economics. According to the expert, McCarthy and his supporters are acting as part of a long-term strategy, the ultimate goal of which is to weaken Biden as a political figure as much as possible by the 2024 elections. “The Democrats always try to portray Trump as the most toxic candidate, so the Republicans want to use a similar approach with Biden “, says Suslov. In addition, the expert emphasized that McCarthy’s decision could complicate the process of approving the federal budget in Congress. This, in turn, could lead to increased political tension and even a shutdown (temporary partial cessation of funding) of the US government.