Will there be an impeachment inquiry into the US president Joe Biden ? The Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, said he was in any case in favor. “I am asking a House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry,” declared the tenor of Congress, believing that the Democratic leader had “lied” to the American people about his son’s controversial affairs abroad.
Hunter Biden, the fifty-year-old son of the Democratic president, has become a favorite target of the American right. She accuses him in particular of having made questionable deals in Ukraine and China while Joe Biden was vice-president of Barack Obama (2009-2017), capitalizing on his father’s networks and name. For its part, the White House castigates this announced impeachment investigation.
“Treason, corruption or other major crimes and misdemeanors”
The U.S. Constitution provides that Congress can impeach the president for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
The opening of a dismissal procedure has been demanded for months by the wing Trumpist of the Republican Party, with which leader Kevin McCarthy had to make numerous compromises to ascend to the perch in January. Several moderate elected officials from the Republican Party, however, are opposed to the opening of this investigation, for fear of transforming the procedure into a purely partisan exercise.
The Democrats respond that these efforts of the right are only screens used to hide the legal disputes which are accumulating for Donald Trumpcharged four times in less than six months.
Never has a president been impeached in American history. Three were indicted: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998 and Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021. But all were ultimately acquitted. Richard Nixon preferred to resign in 1974 to avoid certain impeachment by Congress due to the Watergate scandal.