Republicans will try to impeach Biden ‘every week’, Adam Kinzinger says

Congressman Adam Kinzinger: ‘I think it’ll be a very difficult majority for [Kevin McCarthy] to govern unless he just chooses to go absolutely crazy with them.’ Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

Republicans will try to impeach Joe Biden every week if they retake the House in November, a rare anti-Trump Republican congressman predicted.

Remembering repeated attempts to defund the Affordable Care Act under Barack Obama, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said: “That’s going to look like child’s play in terms of what Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to demand of Kevin McCarthy.

“They’re going to demand an impeachment vote on President Biden every week.”

Kinzinger was speaking to David Axelrod, a former Obama adviser, on his Axe Files podcast.

Kinzinger is one of two Republicans on the House committee investigating the Capitol attack Trump incited. He will retire in November. The other, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, lost her primary to a Trump-backed challenger.

Greene, from Georgia, is among far-right Republicans who have already introduced or threatened impeachment articles against Biden, on issues including Covid, immigration, Afghanistan and the alleged misdemeanors of Hunter Biden, the president’s surviving son.

If McCarthy is to be speaker in a Republican House, the expected outcome of the midterms in November, he must corral his unruly party.

Kinzinger said: “I think it’ll be a very difficult majority for him to govern unless he just chooses to go absolutely crazy with them. In which case you may see the rise of the silent, non-existent moderate Republican that may still exist out there, but I don’t know.”

Democrats impeached Trump twice. Kinzinger voted against the first impeachment, over the blackmail of Ukraine for political purposes, but for the second, over the Capitol attack. He told Axelrod he regretted the first vote.

“You can always look back 12 years, there’s different regrets, different votes. That’s my biggest.

“At the time, I’ll say to my shame, you’re looking for a way out. It is tough to take on your party. It is tough to know you’re gonna get kicked out of the tribe. And it’s tough to make a decision that you know will cost you re-election.

“And so I was looking for a reason out. There were moments where I was like, ‘I may end up voting for this first impeachment.’ And then I found a reason out.”

At the time, he said: “Since the day President Trump was elected, many Democrats in Congress have been searching for any means by which to delegitimise and remove him from office.

“And since then, we’ve seen them jump head first from one investigation to another hoping something so treacherous would be uncovered that we’d have no choice but to throw him out. And at that they’ve failed miserably.”

Nine other House Republicans voted for Trump’s second impeachment, making it the most bipartisan in history. At trial in the Senate, seven Republicans found Trump guilty, not enough for conviction.

Discussing Kinzinger’s work on the January 6 committee, Axelrod pointed to a recent poll which said 72% of Republican voters still back Trump’s lie about election fraud and say Biden is not the legitimate president.

“Tribalism is deeply ingrained,” Kinzinger said, adding: “I think people, in many cases, more than they fear death, they fear being kicked out of the tribe.”