McCarthy’s role as US House Speaker under threat despite launch of Biden impeachment inquiry

WASHINGTON - Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy confronted a fractured caucus on Wednesday, with his role as the top Republican in Congress under threat from the far right, despite giving hardline conservatives the impeachment inquiry they wanted.

Mr McCarthy conceded to weeks of pressure from hardliners and allies of former president Donald Trump by launching a formal probe of President Joe Biden.

The move sidestepped as many as 20 Republicans opposed to the action by avoiding a floor vote that would likely fail.

“We cannot use impeachment as a political weapon against every president,” Republican Representative Don Bacon, a Nebraska centrist, said in a statement.

But even after the announcement, hardline Representative Matt Gaetz again raised the possibility of ousting Mr McCarthy under the terms of a deal he agreed to become Speaker, which gave any one member the power to call a vote for his removal.

Mr Gaetz said Mr McCarthy could face multiple votes on motions to “vacate the chair” for failing to comply with a secret agreement that allowed him to become Speaker in January.

“The path forward for the House of Representatives is to either bring you into immediate, total compliance or remove you,” Mr Gaetz said in a floor speech addressing Mr McCarthy directly.

On Tuesday, Mr McCarthy alleged that Mr Biden had lied to the American people about

his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings.

“House Republicans have uncovered serious and credible allegations about President Biden’s conduct,” he told reporters. “Taken together, these allegations paint a picture of a culture of corruption.”

Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and China while his father was vice-president under president Barack Obama have been a constant target of Republicans.

The younger Biden, a recovering drug addict, is currently

under investigation by a Justice Department special counsel

for possible tax evasion and is expected to be charged by the end of this month with a firearms violation.

However, he has not been charged with crimes related to his foreign business dealings, and no credible evidence has emerged so far that the US President was involved in anything illegal.

Mr McCarthy has been

under pressure from the right wing

of the party, loyal to Trump, for months to open an impeachment inquiry into President Biden.

The White House immediately condemned the move, calling it “extreme politics at its worst”.

“House Republicans have been investigating the President for nine months, and they’ve turned up no evidence of wrongdoing,” Mr Ian Sams, a White House spokesman, said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Mr McCarthy, who was

forced to compromise with the far right of the party

to win his powerful Speaker’s post, said the “allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption” against President Biden “warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives”.

“We have found that President Biden did lie to the American people about his own knowledge of his family’s foreign business dealings,” Mr McCarthy said.

“Bank records show that nearly US$20 million (S$27 million) in payments were directed to Mr Biden’s family members and associates through various shell companies,” he alleged.

Mr McCarthy said the Republican-held House Oversight, Judiciary and Ways and Means committees would carry out the impeachment inquiry. “We will go wherever the evidence takes us,” he said.

Mr McCarthy, whose hold on the Speaker’s gavel is dependent on support from right-wing hardliners, had previously said he would first hold a vote in the House before launching an impeachment inquiry.

But he backed away from that pledge under far-right pressure and the possibility he could not muster enough votes on the House floor.

“He vowed to hold a vote to open impeachment. Now, he flip-flopped because he doesn’t have support,” said Mr Sams, the White House spokesman.

A number of moderate Republican members of the House have expressed scepticism about launching an impeachment probe into Mr Biden.

Under the US Constitution, a president can be impeached for “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors”.

Democratic lawmakers denounced the inquiry as a partisan exercise intended to exact revenge for

the double impeachment

by the then Democratic-controlled House of former Republican president Trump.

“No evidence, just Trump’s command to impeach,” said Democratic Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida.

Representative Jerrold Nadler, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said there is “no basis whatsoever to launch this so-called inquiry”.

“President Biden has done nothing wrong,” Mr Nadler said. “Speaker McCarthy may get to keep his job for another day, but he has once again caved to the most extreme elements of the Republican party.”

Mr Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for Mr Biden’s re-election campaign, called the impeachment inquiry a “political stunt”.

Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination,

is to go on trial in Washington in March on charges of conspiring to overturn the results of the November 2020 election he lost to Mr Biden.

He was impeached twice by the House while in office, once for seeking political dirt on Mr Biden from Ukraine, and a second time for the Jan 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol by his supporters.

He was acquitted by the Republican-majority Senate both times. AFP, REUTERS