He isn’t exactly going out on a limb, but what U.S. Rep. Garret Graves said in an interview with Louisiana Radio Network yesterday was quite accurate and eminently reasonable, and those of us who are more or less foaming at the mouth to put Joe Biden through a presidential impeachment process shouldn’t have a problem with it.
Here’s what Graves had to say…
“What it means is that you are going to do an investigation to determine if there are actions that warrant impeachments. This is an investigatory process, this is doing an investigation,” said Graves. Graves said over the past few months, serval committees, like Judiciary, Oversight, and Ways & Means that have all done investigations and requested information concerning the Bidens and they’ve found questionable items. For example, Hunter Biden has been paid $20 million by countries like Ukraine and Russia to name a few. “And you know this is a person who, and I know this may sound mean but he doesn’t really have any appreciable skills that would suggest that he’s worth $20 million,” said Graves. Graves said whistleblowers are coming forward from the FBI, IRS, and others that have linked President Biden to some of the countries, and potentially even official actions carried out that could be the President using his office to benefit his son’s clients. “And you’ve had some of the people that have cut these checks to Hunter Biden that have explicitly said that Joe Biden was involved, that they were attempting to buy access and things along those lines,” said Graves. Graves reiterates it’s not an impeachment hearing, it’s simply an investigation. He hopes the committee will follow the evidence and thoroughly develop a case before jumping to impeachment hearings.
We like this for a few reasons.
First, it’s a nice comeback to the already-hysterical and eminently nauseating Democrat response which holds that there is “no evidence” to support an impeachment of Biden over the influence-peddling business he and his son were running while he was Vice President. That narrative, which is parroted again and again in the legacy corporate media, convinces very few people; polls show that more than 60 percent of the American people don’t believe Biden’s denials and some 56 percent believe it’s at least “likely” that Biden took bribes.
They aren’t fooling anyone but their own partisans. But here’s the thing – rather than locking horns with these people in a mindless binary argument over whether two plus two equals four, the point Graves is making is hey, it’s just an investigation. It’s not an impeachment yet. And if you guys are right that there is “no evidence,” or – and here’s the fun new version – “no direct evidence” that Biden had his son arranging bribes from the Chinese, Russians, Ukrainians, Romanians and God knows who else (we’re still waiting for the dots to link up so that there’s a line connecting the Bidens to the Mexican cartel bosses, because U.S. border policy can only really be adequately explained by this administration being bought off at the top by the cartels), then it’ll go away.
And who can get upset at that? Congress’ constitutional duty includes governmental oversight, after all, so why shouldn’t it provide that for the top of the executive branch?
Because if not, then that would be an admission that the 2019 impeachment of Donald Trump, essentially for a phone call made in an effort at investigating potential Biden corruption in Ukraine, would have been an overreach and an abuse of power.
And it’s hard to see Democrats admitting that, after all. So what’s good for the goose is surely good for the gander, n’est-ce pas?
Graves also noted, which is pretty important, that some of the people making those can’t-call-them-bribes-because-there’s-n0-evidence-they’re-bribes payments have come out and said that’s what the money was for. Certainly by now everybody knows the Victor Shokin story; he’s the prosecutor in Ukraine that Joe Biden publicly bragged about getting fired…
And Shokin confirmed, at least from his end, that this was a quid pro quo originating from a multimillion-dollar payment from Burisma to the Bidens…
The idea that this is “no evidence” of bribery is utterly absurd – which is the word Chuck Schumer used to describe the announcement of an impeachment investigation.
So the question Chuck Schumer should answer is, does he think it’s absurd to impeach a president on bribery charges?
Hmmm.
OK, then, does he think it’s absurd to call it bribery when the Bidens were paid $20 million for no apparent services rendered to the paymasters? In light of, if nothing else, the Shokin incident?
At some point you come to the conclusion that these are not reasonable people.
And when you reach that point you also come to the conclusion that the way this ought to be done is what Graves seems to be hinting at – which is that this has to be a slow, deliberate, painful grind.
Not an impeachment…yet. Just an investigation.
With full subpoena power. And swearing in witnesses. With pain of imprisonment for contempt of Congress for those who refuse to comply.
There is a jail in the Capitol, you know. And the sergeant-at-arms has the power to put people in it if so directed by Congress. That’s never used – amazingly, a bunch of leftist nuts invaded Kevin McCarthy’s office earlier this week and staged a sit-in to protest what they believe is inaction on funding for HIV vaccines, and none of them were hauled into that jail in the basement on charges of insurrection.
The point is, if the Democrats want to stick their fingers in their ears and scream “Lalalalala!” rather than recognize this is an eminently impeachable, thoroughly compromised, crooked-as hell president, then there’s no point in getting in shouting matches with them.
Simply run the investigation, and grind it out for as long as it takes to prove to anyone who’ll listen that this is clearly a case of a crooked hack pol who sold out his country for filthy foreign lucre, and it’s the textbook case the Impeachment Clause in the Constitution was written for.
It isn’t hard to see how this ends, you know. Ultimately they’re going to yank Biden off the top of that ticket, even if it means they’re stuck with Kamala Harris as the Democrat nominee in 2024. It’s going to be sold as something which has to be done for reasons of his health, which is of course legitimate in its own right. And then these impeachment investigations will be decried, particularly as they uncover more and more evidence of bribery and perhaps treason, as gratuitous abuse of a feeble old man.
Because when you deal in daily absurdity as Chuck Schumer does, that’s how you roll.
Except absurdity tends not to have a lot of staying power.
Garret Graves doesn’t need to come off as a hard charger on impeachment. A slow, gradual, grinding wait-and-see approach is perfectly fine for now.