Impeaching Biden Would Be a Mistake

House Speakers Kevin McCarthy & Newt Gingrich

The 1998 midterms are one of the stranger political elections of the past century, and one of the most under-discussed amongst modern political analysts.  They do, however, provide a lesson to 2024, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has been making a conversation about impeachment far more public, with the California Republican clearly having members of his caucus float trial balloons to see if there's an appetite to impeach President Biden over the recent plea deal involving his son Hunter, and McCarthy would do well to remember what those lessons taught Republicans a generation ago.

In 1998, this was the first time in over a century that we had an election following the impeachment of a sitting president.  While President Bill Clinton did not stand for reelection (he was already on his second term), many Republicans assumed that this would be a point where the public could weigh in on Clinton's trial before Congress, and on his extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky.  The public did weigh in, but they didn't do so in the way that Republicans had expected.  The 1998 midterms saw the first time since 1934 that a non-presidential party failed to gain congressional seats in a midterm, with the Democrats netting five seats in the US House, and neither side netted seats in the Senate (both sides flipped three seats a piece).  This wasn't the expectation going into the night, and it caused a lot of finger-pointing within the Republican caucus.  Then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, at the time considering a run for the White House in 2000, saw his political career go up in smoke, with his caucus rebelling, forcing him to resign from being Speaker, and he soon after gave up on his dream of running for the White House in 2000.

Most of the blame for the weak performance of the Republicans in 1998 was attributed to public thinking that congressional Republicans had overreached when it came to Clinton's impeachment.  Though Clinton's impeachment was officially about perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power, most of the public saw it as retribution for Clinton having an affair with Lewinsky, and Clinton (in the middle of presiding over one of the most successful sustained economies in American history) was too well-liked for people to think this was something that they should remove him from office over.  This was Hillary's problem, not theirs.

This showed up in key elections.  Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-NC) spent much of the 1998 campaign trying to link his opponent, trial attorney (and eventual Vice Presidential nominee) John Edwards to Clinton, but Faircloth's focus on the impeachment trial and support of it ended up providing Edwards with an opening, and cost Faircloth his seat.  Reps. Mike Pappas (NJ) & Jon Fox (PA) also suffered in their House races.  Pappas had sung the song "Twinkle, Twinkle, Kenneth Starr" on the House floor, and Rush Holt was able to make Pappas look like he didn't take government seriously, while Fox didn't read the tea leaves in his increasingly blue district that didn't want Clinton out of office, and was bested by State Rep. Joe Hoeffel.

Many Democrats worried when they impeached Donald Trump in 2019 that this was playing the same game, where Democrats would suffer in the same way Republicans did in 1998.  This didn't happen, though, and that was because public support for impeaching Trump was considerably higher than Clinton's.  Trump didn't successfully sell to the public that this was specious (though he certainly claimed it was), Nancy Pelosi made a point of keeping it a very serious affair (which Gingrich did not), and as a result the Democrats actually gained House and Senate seats in the following election.  This sets up a limited case study-impeachment can be bad for your future election chances IF the public doesn't support it.

Hunter Biden

So where does this leave McCarthy?  Not in a good spot.  Public support for Biden's impeachment is hard to read given that the potential charges against him are not openly known, but limited public polling shows that support for it is not high, certainly not a majority like with Trump.  It helps that there's not really a reason to impeach Biden.  Though Republicans have claimed there's more charges & evidence to come in the Hunter Biden case, common sense dictates that if they had it...it'd be public.  The charges therefore boil down to a couple of relatively tangential connections between the president and his son's legal affairs.  One, allegations that the Biden Justice Department stonewalled an IRS review of Hunter Biden's personal finances (and the president's involvement in them) and two, allegations from Sen. Chuck Grassley that the FBI had documentation that the Biden family received $10 million during the president's time as Vice President, the document claiming that Biden had pressured Ukraine to remove a senior government official and as a result received payment from an energy company.

Neither of these seem to link directly to the president, even if they're true (which is also up for debate).  The President and First Lady have released their tax records for 25+ years, so any influx of $10 million would be pretty easy to identify, and there's no evidence the Justice Department mishandled the Hunter Biden case, or that the president was at all involved in the case (he's made a point of being hand's off with the Justice Department in affairs like this).  As a result, this comes across as a lot of right-wing theories and would be really hard for Republicans to convince anyone other than the most devoted.  What it would do is make Democrats and independents who rallied around Biden in 2020 more inclined to support him next year, and that could have a profound effect on the 2024 elections, particularly House races.  Incumbents like Brian Fitzpatrick & Don Bacon have gotten reelected largely by avoiding votes like this; forcing them to cast a vote against Biden would open them up in the way that Fox/Pappas suffered in 1998.  Someone like Ted Cruz or Kari Lake could also fall into the trap of Lauch Faircloth in the Senate-not realizing that their state is moving further left than they undertood, and focusing on impeachment becoming a bad look compared to bread-and-butter issues.  McCarthy, a leader who focuses only on the next problem ahead rather than long-term as a rule, is potentially sacrificing not only a second term as Speaker, but also much of his party's advantages in 2024, by pursuing a course driven by his most conservative caucus members.