The House on Thursday voted to refer articles of impeachment of President Joe Biden to the Homeland Security and Judiciary committees, punting on an impeachment vote that may have been politically difficult for some Republicans.
The party line vote, 219-208, came after Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert sought to force a vote on impeachment this week by filing a privileged resolution that allows a member to bypass House leadership to bring a measure to the floor. Boebert’s resolution argues that Biden has violated federal immigration laws and failed to protect the country’s southern border.
In an apparent agreement to avoid a vote directly on impeachment, the House Rules Committee met Wednesday night and sent to the floor a rule to refer Boebert’s measure to the committees.
On the House floor Thursday, Boebert said the move would allow Republicans to build “a body of evidence at the committee level” that would provide evidence for an eventual impeachment trial in the Senate.
“Since his first day in office, President Biden has trampled on the Constitution through his dereliction of duty under Article II to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” she said. “Instead of enforcing our immigration laws, he has lawlessly ignored them and released more than 2 million illegal aliens into the interior of the United States without any enforcement mechanism to ensure that they appear in immigration court.”
Sending the resolution to committees meant that the full House didn’t need to weigh in on whether to impeach Biden immediately, a move some Republicans seemed unready to support.
“Just disagreeing with someone on their policy decisions doesn’t meet” the high crimes and misdemeanors standard of impeachment, Rep. Dan Newhouse, one of two remaining House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, told The Washington Post.
Eighteen House Republicans represent districts that Biden would have won in 2020.
Talking to reporters after the vote, Boebert said she hoped to work on the investigation and that they would be ready to bring articles to the floor “this year, and very soon.”
“I came here to fix Congress, and my actions to call up my privileged resolution made way to begin an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden,” she said.
Boebert’s effort to force a floor vote came the same week as Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., forced a vote to censure Democratic Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California for his role in investigating and impeaching President Donald Trump.
Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, the top Democrat on the Rules Committee, said that “nothing about this is serious” and said that Speaker Kevin McCarthy had “lost control” of the floor to the far right.
“This body has become a place where extreme, outlandish and nutty issues get debated passionately, and important ones not at all,” McGovern said.
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