GOP must deliver goods in Biden inquiry

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On its face, the impeachment probe announced last week by U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a waste of time.

Republicans have admitted they have no actual proof of actual wrongdoing by President Joe Biden. Nor do they even know for certain that their accusations are based on legitimate information, not just something they pulled from someone's partisan internet blog.

Nor do most of them seem to really care. The theatrics are the point, all of it encouraged from the wings by former President Donald Trump, whose legal woes are backed up by more hard evidence than Mar-a-Lago has storage boxes.

But in the Biden matter, so far, the investigation looks less like fact-finding than performative vengeance.

In an announcement after which McCarthy took no questions, he called the impeachment inquiry the "logical next step" for Republican claims — did we mention they are unproven? — that Biden somehow was enriched by his son Hunter's international business ventures when the elder Biden was vice president.

This time, the House is led by McCarthy, a California Republican, who famously harvested enough votes to win the speaker's gavel by agreeing to a House rule change that enables any House member to call for a vote to remove him from the speaker's position.

McCarthy also faces high pressure from far-right, pro-Trump members of his conference ahead of a coming GOP showdown between Republicans over spending and other questions, including whether he could survive as speaker if he fails to impeach Biden after the double impeachment of his predecessor, Trump.

As a result, when any House Republican speaks, nutty extremist or not, McCarthy listens. Very politely.

Yet, the skepticism you read here is not to say that legitimate suspicions about a president's personal or family interests should not be investigated for conflicts with the public's interests. Especially at these levels of government.

Even a Democrat as loyal to the Bidens as Illinois' senior Sen. Dick Durbin tellingly told CNN Tuesday that, despite the lack of evidence to back impeachment — and despite his sense that the inquiry was a symptom of an "out of control" Republican House majority — he, too, felt as "uncomfortable" with the impression that Hunter Biden capitalized on his father's position, as he did about similar allegations about Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in the previous administration.

So far, information that has worked its way out of GOP-led House committees suggests, at minimum, a strong perception of a conflict of interest on Hunter Biden's part in various ventures, including in China and Ukraine, while his father was dealing with those countries as vice president. Clearly, the younger Biden was not shy about using his last name to his advantage. Nor was he shy about cashing in from a father's open affection for his son.

But despite releasing bank records connected to the younger Biden that show a series of lucrative payments, GOP House committees have so far failed to produce evidence that links those payments made to the president's son to ways that might also have personally benefited his father, beyond his understandable satisfaction that his struggling son was getting his act together.

Nor has evidence emerged that Joe Biden abused his power in a way that would fit the constitutional standard for impeachment of treason, bribery and high crimes and misdemeanors. Impeachments are supposed to be shocking occasions, and that was true for most of the history of this nation. They are supposed to be entered into only in dire matters of national interest. They have been cheapened by overuse.

Some Republican leaders of the House Oversight Committee see corruption in dinners that Joe Biden attended with his son and his associates in 2014 and 2015 and a visit he made to Ukraine, shortly after Hunter Biden styled himself as a consultant-fixer and started earning $1 million a year from the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.

Yet those details, as we now know them, hardly come up to the standard for circumstantial evidence that shows the president needed to be impeached.

It is instructive to remember McCarthy's claim of the moral high ground before the House voted to impeach Trump in December 2019. He complained that the move, led by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was not supported by — guess what? — evidence.

"Will we let impeachment become an exercise of raw political power, regardless if it damages our country?" McCarthy asked. "Or will we protect the proper grounds and process for impeachment now and in the future?"

McCarthy complained then that Democrats wanted to undo the results of the previous election in order "to influence the next one."

If McCarthy's speech at that time explains any of his tactics today, he can thank his rivals.

Just, please, don't waste our time with this unless you have the goods.