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There’s a simple rule at the heart of Congressional Strategy 101: Good leaders find issues that divide opponents and unite allies. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has a knack for getting this backward, finding issues that unite opponents and divide allies.
As members of Congress prepare to exit Capitol Hill for their annual August break, Republicans are already divided over appropriations bills. And reproductive rights. And military spending. And the merits of the recent debt ceiling agreement. And the value of trying to “expunge” Donald Trump’s impeachments.
A recent Politico report referenced “a new era of factional warfare” within the House GOP conference, adding that many Republicans “worry that tensions in their midst could make for a summer of hell.”
It was against this backdrop that McCarthy apparently decided it’d be a good idea to give members of his party something new to fight with each other about. Reporting on the House speaker raising the prospect of an impeachment inquiry targeting President Joe Biden, NBC News summarized:
Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s suggestion that the House would be justified in beginning an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden over unproven claims of corruption is drawing strong pushback from Democrats and mixed reviews from Republicans.
To be sure, some in the GOP appear quite pleased with McCarthy having opened this door. Donald Trump is on board, for example, as are members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus.
But over the last few days, there have been quite a few congressional Republicans eager to throw water on the simmering impeachment flames. Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, who chairs the House GOP campaign arm, insisted, “No one is seriously talking about impeachment right now,” despite the fact that many of his intra-party colleagues are doing exactly that.
Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado said such talk isn’t “responsible” and suggested McCarthy is distracting partisans by using impeachment as a “shiny object.” Around the same time, Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas added, “There are some people that aren’t going to be happy until everybody in Washington gets impeached. And it just looks like that’s the road we’re going down.”
Senate Republicans appear to be even less impressed by this week’s chatter.
In other words, the House speaker saw a divided party and deliberately chose to make matters worse.
One of the overarching questions is why in the world McCarthy would do this. It’s possible that the California congressman just isn’t especially good at his profoundly difficult job, but it’s more likely that he’s taking these steps — which he made clear he didn’t support as recently as last fall — because he thinks he has to.
The House speaker has plenty to fear — from his far-right flank, his party’s frontrunner for the 2024 presidential nomination, and the revised rules surrounding motions to vacate the chair — and it’s easy to believe those pressures are forcing McCarthy’s hand. The alternative is that he actually thinks talking about impeachment and further dividing his party is sensible, which is absurd.