OPINION:
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s recent hints about possible impeachment hearings for Attorney General Merrick Garland don’t mean the gloves are off on Capitol Hill.
Even if there were enough votes in the House of Representatives to sustain any of the potential charges — and that’s no sure thing — there are not now and will never be a majority of senators willing to vote to convict Mr. Garland and see him removed from office. Mr. Garland, moreover, could simply resign before such a vote, leaving his subordinates in place to carry on as before.
A more serious way to force change at the Department of Justice would be to join the handful of senators — all Republicans — who have called on Mr. Garland to recuse himself from further involvement in any investigations surrounding the White House.
If it were up to us, the recusal request would apply not just to the attorney general but to all the department’s senior political appointees. Matters involving Hunter Biden or the first family ought to be handled by a career government employee rather than someone who serves at the pleasure of the president.
The reason for this should be obvious. What is now credibly charged by government whistleblowers about Mr. Garland’s actions pales in comparison with those leveled against Mr. Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions. The former Alabama senator was forced to remove himself from any matter concerning the now-disproven allegations that the former president’s 2016 presidential campaign had “colluded” with Russia.
The bar set by Democrats for recusal in the prior administration’s earliest days was comically low. As a senator, Mr. Sessions had once met the Russian ambassador, as he had done with the official representatives from 24 other nations.
Now, whistleblowers have raised serious questions whether Mr. Garland misled Congress regarding the ability of David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware, to bring indictments against Hunter Biden. The apparent conflict in having Mr. Garland involved in investigating his own boss is obvious.
Some might dismiss the complaints against Mr. Garland as the product of wool-gathering Republicans determined to wreck the Biden administration, but this is not simply a partisan matter. In the past, similar concerns were embraced by members of both parties, whether the occupant of the White House was a Republican or a Democrat.
Today, we can’t think of any prominent Democrat who holds an elective office anywhere in the country who has been willing to even acknowledge the concerns raised about Hunter Biden’s conduct and what it would mean if even half of the allegations were true.
The nation is experiencing a failure of leadership at the highest levels. If, as alleged, it is true that Mr. Garland steered the investigation of Hunter Biden’s activities away from anything having to do with his father, that would be a serious impropriety. The attorney general cannot oversee an inquiry that is fair, impartial, and just while the public’s confidence in him has been compromised by substantive allegations.
Such allegations are worthy of at least as much attention as was lavished on the outlandish claims that were part of the now-discredited Steele dossier during the previous administration.
Instead of calls for impeachment, which appear to be more for show than anything else, Republicans ought to follow the example of Democrats who succeeded in browbeating Mr. Trump’s attorney general into stepping aside. Mr. McCarthy should be the one leading the calls for Mr. Garland to recuse himself.
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