Steve Benen notes the latest House GOP push to impeach President Biden, this time in connection with the President’s threat to not deliver certain weapons to Israel if it invades Rafah in Gaza as part of its retaliation campaign against Hamas. The GOP is trying to portray it as the same as the incident with Ukraine for which then-President Trump was impeached, but failed to be convicted by the Senate.
As best as I can tell, Mills and Cotton believe there’s a parallel between Biden’s policy and Donald Trump’s 2019 extortion scheme toward Ukraine, in which the Republican withheld security aid in the hopes of getting Ukraine to help him cheat in his 2020 re-election campaign. It’s the scandal that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
This is not, however, a serious argument, in large part because there’s nothing illegal about Biden’s policy, and he’s not trying to leverage security aid for campaign help.
What’s more, a White House official told The Hill that the GOP’s claims are “ridiculous,” adding, “Senior administration officials had already made multiple public statements about Rafah similar to the President’s, including that we are also ensuring Israel gets every dollar appropriated in the supplemental. Trump failed to spend dollars appropriated by Congress that he was legally required to spend. This is about a purchase made by a foreign government and our decision whether to deliver that purchase right now, which could enable an operation we’ve publicly and privately objected to.”
All of which reminds me of a birthday party I attended a couple of years ago. Among the strangers I met was an assistant or vice election judge. Plainly a liberal, she was more than a little bewildered by her observation that the Republican lawyers being sent by the Minnesota GOP to observe election procedures were just getting dumber as the years passed. You expect improvement over time, no? But she wasn’t observing that.
I think that this same phenomenon is happening in Congress with the GOP. I know, I know, no surprise. Don’t they understand that, if the situations were parallel, that they’ve just admitted Mr Trump was indeed guilty of a high crime and should have indeed been convicted?
Somehow, I doubt it.
