Republicans are barreling toward an impeachment vote, still short of a majority. But if they skip one altogether, it might look like failure to the base.
Now that House Republicans have formalized the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, anything less than voting to remove him could look like failure.
Right now, though, they don’t have the votes to do that — putting them in a bind of their own making.
Much of the House GOP has tried to keep the question of a full-scale removal vote at arm’s length, despite the course they’ve charted toward formal articles of impeachment. It’s not hard to see why: They’ll start the election year with only a three-vote majority, which could shrink even further, and 17 incumbents who represent districts Biden won. Plus, Democrats are almost guaranteed to unanimously oppose impeachment.
All that means a vote to recommend booting the president from office would be highly risky.
Republicans stress they’ve only endorsed giving their investigations more legal teeth, as they’ve struggled to find clear evidence linking decisions made by Joe Biden to his family’s business deals. And that’s the bar some centrists have emphasized that investigators need to clear in order to earn enough votes.
Every presidential impeachment inquiry in modern times has led to a formal impeachment vote — except in the case of Richard Nixon, who resigned from office before that could happen. A GOP failure to follow suit this time would likely mean severe backlash from the right flank, former President Donald Trump and an increasingly restless base who, some Republicans acknowledge, treat impeachment as a fait accompli.