President Joe Biden’s impeachment investigation, according to Speaker Kevin McCarthy, is likely to happen soon, calling it „a natural step forward” as Congress prepares to return from its summer recess and House Republicans work to increase their investigative authority.
McCarthy, a Republican from California, has thus far refrained from pledging to support impeachment or providing a timetable for potential action. Biden is being targeted by some House Republicans amid allegations that his son Hunter engaged in financial malfeasance, but no wrongdoing by the Democratic president has been established.
In the meantime, McCarthy made an appeal to conservatives concerned that a bipartisan agreement with Senate Democrats would not reduce enough spending, by saying that adopting a short-term budget package to keep the government operating through the end of September would ensure that investigations into Hunter Biden could continue.
Before required spending cuts that neither party wants to implement in the new year, the interim measure would buy time to negotiate a longer-term budget agreement.
„If you look at all the information we have been able to gather so far, it is a natural step forward that you would have to go to an impeachment inquiry,” McCarthy said on Fox News Channel’s „Sunday Morning Futures.” He claimed that an impeachment investigation „provides Congress with the apex of legal power to get all the information they need.”
McCarthy is on a razor’s edge, as he juggles demands from party members, who want to show their allegiance to Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
But the speaker also runs the danger of jeopardizing the tenuous GOP House majority. Biden is unlikely to be removed from office by the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, even if he was to be impeached in the House.
The beginning of the next budget year on October 1 is quickly approaching, and a spending agreement would be required to prevent a partial federal shutdown.
The House is scheduled to start working again in mid-September. „If we stop, the entire government stops, including with any investigations. The American people are harmed, according to McCarthy. Conservatives, many of whom are members of the House Freedom Caucus, typically are reluctant to support short-term funding solutions because they are pushing for more drastic expenditure cuts and using the fear of a shutdown as pressure.
Small-scale conservative protesters McCarthy’s leadership in the House shut down the House in June.
When Biden and McCarthy reached an agreement during the recent debt-ceiling-negotiations, all parties reached an agreement on budget levels.
McCarthy’s negotiation position with the White House and Senate Democrats would be strengthened by a stopgap budget bill, according to the speaker.
We’re all participating in this conversation, he said. We must thus have a stronger hand.
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