So that blew up in House Republicans’ faces
House Republicans have spent all year holding public hearings about Joe and Hunter Biden, and no one has paid any real attention. So on Thursday, House Republicans tried a different strategy. They held the same kind of generic public hearing they’ve been holding all year, but this time they falsely advertised it as an “impeachment inquiry.” By the end of the day, they probably wished they hadn’t.
House Republicans’ goal was pretty obvious. It didn’t matter that their hearing on Thursday was just a generic public hearing, and didn’t fit any legal or procedural definition of an impeachment inquiry or impeachment process. Their only goal was to get the media to put the words “Biden” and “impeachment” in the same sentence, so the public would think the Republicans are impeaching Biden when they’re not.
That strategy worked, in the sense that nearly every major media outlet was eager to get on board with falsely referring to this hearing as an “impeachment inquiry” or some similarly inaccurate label. The problem for House Republicans is that the phony hype caused one of their crapola hearings to actually get attention for once.
House Republicans’ star witness was Jonathan Turley, a once-respected legal pundit who has spent the past few years developing a taste for going on right wing propaganda outlets and saying the stupid things they want to hear so they’ll praise him. But even he ended up unwilling to go down this particular rabbit hole, admitting that he didn’t see enough evidence against Joe Biden to justify an impeachment process. Did House Republicans even talk with this guy before they booked him for this hearing? The Republicans’ other two star witnesses were somehow even worse.
As has been the case all year with these House Republican public hearings, it was the House Democrats who stole the show. One Democrat after another stepped up to stomp on the witnesses and call out the Republicans for even putting on such a sham.
If any persuadable viewers tuned in for these hearings, they surely came away with thoughts along the lines of “Okay so that wasn’t an impeachment inquiry” and “Joe Biden didn’t do anything wrong” and “Wow these House Republicans are idiots.” So if there was any impact at all from this hearing, it was to the Republicans’ detriment.
So why did House Republicans bother with this pointless farce at all? Their most unhinged members have been pressuring them all year to take some kind of step in the direction of impeaching President Biden, and if nothing else, this joke of a hearing managed to put that to bed. But at what cost? House Republicans finally managed to get the media to cover one of their hearings, for the first time all year – and all it did was shine a spotlight on how clownishly inept they are.
