Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) encouraged House Republicans to vote against Rep. Lauren Boebert’s (R-CO) resolution to force a vote to impeach President Joe Biden this week, just days after Boebert and others in the Freedom Caucus ground legislating to a halt to get even with McCarthy for making a debt ceiling deal with the President, CNN reported.
In a closed door meeting on Wednesday, McCarthy told his caucus that it is not the right time to impeach Biden. He argued that Republicans should let ongoing committee investigations play out before voting on an impeachment article, adding that jumping ahead could threaten their ability to hold onto their slim majority in the next election.
“What majority do we want to be,” McCarthy asked his caucus, according to an individual in the room CNN spoke to. “Give it right back in two years or hold it for a decade and make real change?”
McCarthy has been in a pretty public fight with far-right House Freedom Caucus members since he stopped his party’s own hostage-taking and made a deal with President Biden to increase the debt ceiling and not let the country default on its debts.
Earlier this month, a group of MAGA hardliners revolted on the House floor, purposely sinking a procedural rule vote in the Republican-controlled House in retaliation for the debt limit deal. Republican leadership canceled planned votes for the rest of the week in response, crippling the House schedule and effectively blocking their own party from passing messaging legislation.
Now McCarthy and some other House Republicans are expressing concerns over Boebert’s rushed push to vote on her impeachment article.
“It’s not right,” Rep. Don Bacon told CNN, when asked about the impeachment article.
“I believe in team sports, you should work together and this is individual and I believe it is undermining the team,” Bacon said, adding “I don’t worry just about the team – it’s about Congress, it’s about our country. Impeachment shouldn’t be something that is frivolous and treated in that way. And it is, if you do a privileged motion, and impeachments are so serious. You have to go through committee.”
But despite the pushback, some far-right members are still planning to vote with Boebert.
Boebert is certainly not the first House Republican to file articles of impeachment against Biden or others in his administration. In May, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced her own articles of impeachment against Biden, saying this was only the “first set” of impeachment articles she would be offering against the President.
But unlike Greene, Boebert made a specific procedural move on Tuesday, forcing the House to vote on the impeachment article this week.
Greene said she would support Bobert but also accused her of copying her recent impeachment resolution against Biden, calling her a “copycat” for offering an impeachment resolution similar to the one she proposed.
“She basically copied my articles and then introduced them and then changed them to a privileged resolution,” Greene said. “So of course, I support them because they’re identical to mine.”
