Mitch McConnell Refuses to Take a Stand, Shoots Down Calls for Biden Impeachment: He 'Is Not Going to Be Removed from Office'
Ahead of President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January, the satirical Christian website The Babylon Bee ran a spoof headline announcing that sewage trucks had arrived in Washington, D.C., to refill the Swamp upon President Donald Trump’s departure from the capital.
It certainly felt like this was the case when the 45th president left and the Republican Party he had so significantly transformed in such a short time was left with a mere one-vote majority in the U.S. Senate.
With Trump gone and the Democratic Party controlling both the House of Representatives and the White House, the only person standing in the way of the most radical platform the party had ever championed was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a RINO among RINOs, establishment to the core and one of the biggest enablers of the Democrats’ twice-ill-fated impeachment attempts against the former president.
Things definitely looked grim.
And yet they have turned out far worse than we thought.
Even now, at the lowest of the low points of President Joe Biden’s disaster-ridden tenure, when a majority of voters believe the commander in chief should resign in disgrace over his handling of the Afghanistan crisis, McConnell has gone the way of the Swamp.
On Wednesday, the Kentucky senator firmly shot down impeachment even as several of the upper chamber’s top Republican figures have called for Biden to be removed from or vacate office.
Speaking at an event in Kentucky, McConnell said flatly, “The president is not going to be removed from office.”
“There’s a Democratic House, a narrowly Democratic Senate. That’s not going to happen,” he explained when asked if Biden’s actions in Afghanistan were impeachable offenses and if he’d support efforts to remove the president from office, The Hill reported.
“There isn’t going to be an impeachment,” McConnell added.
He certainly didn’t feel that way when Trump was being impeached for significantly less and the Democrats didn’t have the votes to convict.
“Coming from the guy who threw Trump under the bus after the second impeachment hoax?” former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis wrote in disgust on Twitter.
“I guess he thinks that encouraging people to ‘peacefully and patriotically’ make their voices heard is more impeachable than literally arming the Taliban and leaving Americans behind.”
Coming from the guy who threw Trump under the bus after the second impeachment hoax? lol.
I guess he thinks that encouraging people to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard is more impeachable than literally arming the Taliban and leaving Americans behind. https://t.co/Cmzd7qlUAT
— Jenna Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) September 1, 2021
Although Trump urged his followers to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” on Jan. 6 and condemned the attack on Capitol Hill via social media, urging all his supporters to comply with law enforcement and go home, he became the first president to be impeached twice and to be tried after leaving office.
McConnell allowed the impeachment proceedings to go forward, and while he ultimately voted to acquit, he made a point to nonetheless throw the former president under the bus, issuing a scathing statement denouncing Trump’s actions prior to Jan. 6 as a “disgraceful dereliction of duty,” as NBC News reported at the time.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said last week he believes Biden should be impeached for his actions in Afghanistan, according to The Hill.
His GOP colleague Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has raised the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Biden from office — a procedure that Democrats routinely suggested could be used against Trump throughout his term.
Meanwhile, Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, two of the most prominent Republicans in the Senate, have called for Biden to resign.
Over in the House, Trump loyalists in the minority GOP have called for a Biden impeachment, and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene filed three impeachment articles last month.
When asked previously if he agreed with Greene’s actions, McConnell replied, “No.”
On Wednesday, he said he believes next year’s midterms will be sufficient to mitigate Biden’s actions.
“The report card you get is every two years,” he said. “I think the way these behaviors get adjusted in this country is at the ballot box.”
“I do think we’re likely to see a typical kind of midterm reaction to a new administration. … Typically there is some buyer’s remorse.”
It’s difficult to believe that McConnell is even talking about the current administration. Right now, “buyer’s remorse” is hardly an apt description for the outrage and indignation felt by Americans.
What’s more, the midterms, of course, take place over a year from now.
I don’t think I can word this strongly enough: Waiting for the Democrats to lose some House seats in a year and a half is far from enough to hold Biden accountable for his egregious actions in Afghanistan, which have left the blood of American troops and sadly, likely also the blood of American civilians, on his hands.
McConnell had every opportunity here to draw substantial attention to Biden’s ineptitude, even if the Senate doesn’t have the votes to impeach him.
The twin impeachments, however flimsy their basis, certainly did a lot to undermine Trump’s presidency and probably also his perception in the public eye.
To impeach Biden at this time would not only be morally appropriate; it would be politically advantageous. McConnell surely knows that signaling support for impeachment, whether it’s a viable option or not, could add substantial weight to public outrage against Biden — and yet he’s not even willing to do this.
What did I say?
He’s a man of the Swamp, through and through.
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