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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that he will let the House handle the impeachment inquiry against President Biden and see how it “plays out.”
“I don’t think Speaker McCarthy needs any advice from the Senate on how to run the House,” said Mr. McConnell, Kentucky Republican.
“Look we’ve got our hands full here trying to get through the appropriations process … and I don’t have any advice to give to the house,” he told reporters at the Capitol. “They’ve got a totally different set of challenges than we do. So I think the best advice for the Senate is to do our job and we’ll see how this plays out later.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced Tuesday that the House will go forward with an impeachment inquiry of Mr. Biden to examine his involvement in his son Hunter Biden’s big-money foreign business deals.
Just last month in a New York Times interview, Mr. McConnell said that impeachments “ought to be rare” and that “this is not good for the county.”
“I said two years ago, when we had not one but two impeachments, that once we go down this path, it incentivizes the other side to do the same thing,” he said.
Before the two impeachments of former President Donald Trump, the last president to face impeachment had been President Clinton in 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice for lying to federal investigators. Before that, the last president to face impeachment was President Andrew Johnson in 1868.
Impeachments were rare, but now the country has seen three impeachment inquiries in the span of five years.
“It really comes to how do you prioritize your time,” Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, told The Hill. “I don’t know of anybody who believes [Democratic Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer will take it up and actually have a trial and convict a sitting president.”
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.
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