OPINION:
Democrats are complaining House Republicans lack just cause to open an impeachment investigation against a squeaky-clean guy like President Biden.
“They have not even begun to approach the high bar of high crimes and misdemeanors,” Rep. Jerry Nadler, New York Democrat, said in a statement last week.
Mr. Nadler held the bar much lower to the ground when he led the House Judiciary Committee in bringing impeachment charges against Donald Trump over a phone call the then-president had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Where Mr. Nadler errs is that House Republicans don’t need to establish “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Under Article 2, Section 4 of the Constitution, bribery alone is sufficient cause to remove a president or vice president from office. The evidence accumulated to date suggests there’s good reason to think that influence-peddling by the Biden family would qualify.
The expected response from Mr. Biden’s defenders will be that, though unseemly, his actions as vice president fail to meet the complex standard of bribery under the federal statute. This is where past Democratic zeal to “get Trump” will come back to haunt them.
In 2019, Mr. Nadler chaired an impeachment hearing in which Stanford Law School professor Pamela Karlan joined Harvard Law’s Noah Feldman to argue that bribery uses a broader common law definition in a constitutional context.
“In 1789, when the framers were writing the Constitution, there was no criminal code,” Ms. Karlan explained. “So, when they say in the Constitution that a president can be removed for bribery, they weren’t referring to a statute.”
“Bribery had a clear meaning to the Framers,” Mr. Feldman explained. “It was when the president using the power of his office solicits or receives something of personal value from someone affected by his official powers.”
Back then, Democrats intended to bring a bribery charge against Mr. Trump using this broadened understanding. Even so, they couldn’t make bribery stick, and they fell back on vague charges of “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress.”
Today, the definitions advanced by Ms. Karlan and Mr. Feldman much more readily apply to the actions Mr. Biden took as vice president that advanced the interests of Hunter Biden’s businesses and associates.
There’s quite a bit to choose from: the use of Air Force Two to promote Hunter Biden’s business; Mr. Biden’s dining at Cafe Milano with a Kazakh businessman who gave Hunter $142,000; the federal government allowing Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina to slip sanctions after she gave $3.5 million to a company owned by Hunter.
There is also the elder Mr. Biden’s threat to withhold aid to Ukraine unless the country fired the prosecutor investigating the company that had hired Hunter.
These certainly could be construed as the use of official powers to gain something of personal value.
As the House committees gather new evidence about the connections between Mr. Biden’s actions and his family, Democrats most likely will lean heavily on the technicalities of the federal bribery statute.
Republicans shouldn’t take the bait. All they need to do is recycle video from the Democratic impeachment effort in 2019.
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