Impeaching Biden would be a mistake

OPINION:

A few days ago, Speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy was asked whether he would encourage the House to impeach President Biden for his border policies in the event the Republicans gain the majority in the House.

He rejected the idea immediately, noting that Republicans favor the rule of law, not the rule of political expedience.

Mr. McCarthy has never really been everyone’s favorite flavor. He worries too much about raising cash and too little about what to do with the power that God has inexplicably given him. He also hangs out with some fairly shady people from time to time.

In this instance, however, he is completely and absolutely correct.

Impeaching the president is a terrible idea. Impeachment is and should be reserved for high crimes and misdemeanors, not for policy differences. In this country, we resolve policy differences mostly through elections. The criminalization of policy differences is one of the worst pathologies out there.

Removing one’s political rivals and disqualifying their political preferences through judicial and quasi-judicial processes rather than elections is the sort of thing that banana republics do. Such an approach nullifies electoral processes and guarantees a destabilization of representative government and society.

Given the expanse and maze of laws we have created, every president emphasizes and prioritizes execution of certain laws and provisions of laws. That is as it should be: Elections do and should have consequences. A president choosing to emphasize or prioritize different laws or provisions of law than you might prefer does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

Others have suggested that, rather than impeach the president, perhaps we should just impeach Cabinet officials. That’s an even worse idea. If that becomes precedential and normalized, we will have become a parliamentary system in which the legislature is really the only branch of government and the executive is toothless and enervated. 

We will get to enjoy the pathologies that come along with such a system — an unhappy reliance on unstable coalition governments, an increased opacity of government actions and an inability to make national decisions in a prompt and decisive manner.

As a practical matter, an impeachment process next year would be a colossal waste of time and resources. Even if the House did send charges and specifications over to the Senate, there is no way there would be 67 votes to convict Mr. Biden. Nor should there be. To pursue impeachment would take up valuable time and mindshare and complicate and retard the ability of congressional Republicans to meaningfully slow the federal government’s current headlong rush into the abyss.

There is, of course, another practicality. In the exceedingly unlikely event that Mr. Biden is impeached, convicted and removed from office, he would be replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris. Can anyone say with confidence that Ms. Harris would be a better president than the current occupant?

I get it. Team Trump harbors residual anger at Congress for impeaching him on specious grounds not once, but twice. They should. But it seems unwise to let the anger of one group of former participants in the process drive the rest of us into creating pathologies and precedents that we will all soon come to regret.

I’m pretty confident that every mother in America has on multiple occasions pointed out that two wrongs do not make a right. At this moment, that seems like wise counsel.

Good for Mr. McCarthy.

• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is the president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House.