House Republicans have reached a deal to defer consideration on the floor of a proposal from Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) to impeach President Joe Biden. That means there won’t yet be a vote on the initiative by all members. Instead, her proposal will go to consideration by multiple House committees, including the Judiciary panel, which is currently led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
Boebert had initially announced plans to procedurally force the full chamber to vote on her idea of impeaching the president. She isn’t the first member of the House to push for Biden’s impeachment, but various reports indicated frustration inside the chamber’s Republican conference with the Colorado member’s insistence on rushing to a vote. House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has reached an agreement with Boebert “to send the Biden impeachment resolution for review to the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, fending off a vote for some time,” according to the Associated Press.
Predictably, Boebert has maintained her commitment to the option of heading back to the privileged resolution route, which is the procedural mechanism by which she was originally hoping to force Republicans and Democrats in the House to vote on her idea. On a similar procedural basis, Republicans voted this week to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), delivering what is essentially just a formal rebuke — which carries less weight than they might hope in an environment where they’ve already dragged down the basic standards of decency.
Like other impeachment efforts that have targeted Biden and other top officials in his administration, Boebert’s attempt to impeach the president — which only has a handful of formal cosponsors — focuses on supposed problems in his handling of the southern border. Unsurprisingly, the articles of impeachment that she introduced also make outright false claims about the situation there, including the contention that criminal organizations have taken complete control of the area, which does not have any meaningful relationship to actual reality.
