We must get to the bottom of his semi-fascist-y behavior. For democracy!
Over at MSNBC, Steve Benen contends that Republicans, poised to take back the House next year, keep promising to impeach Joe Biden but “haven’t quite worked out” why. As a big fan of impeachments and congressional investigations, I may have some helpful ideas.
In his conduct while president of the United States, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has shown a habitual contempt for the rule of law, on numerous occasions willfully violating his constitutional oath by corrupting and manipulating the power of the executive branch.
Take the eviction moratorium. The Supreme Court explicitly ruled that the plan “exceeded … existing statutory authority.” Biden even conceded that the “bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.” And yet, knowing all this, the president decreed it so, openly ignoring the Constitution, admitting to cynically exploiting the slow pace of judicial branch rulings “to keep this going for a month, at least — I hope longer.”
Biden again knowingly subverted the will of Congress when he transferred loan payments for millions of affluent students to taxpayers in hopes of affecting the 2022 midterms. The president does not possess the statutory power to “forgive” or “cancel” loans. Just ask congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi, who correctly noted that “[p]eople think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness — he does not.” He did it anyway. Unilaterally. The president used the emergency powers found in the HEROES Act, passed after 9/11 to help U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, to justify his decree. We know that Biden cynically exploited the bill, because, by his own recent admission on “60 Minutes,” he concedes there is no emergency.
Let’s hope that Republicans don’t limit themselves to a presidential impeachment, either. There might be numerous reasons to investigate Attorney General Merrick Garland, but none deserves more scrutiny than his role in chilling dissent by intimidating parents who opposed critical race theory and Covid mask mandates.
