#Republicans bash Boebert for forcing Biden impeachment vote: ‘Frivolous’

House Republicans on Wednesday teed off on one of their own colleagues, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), over her stunning move to force a vote this week to impeach President Biden.

While no fans of the president, Boebert’s GOP critics said her move to stage an impeachment vote this week is wildly premature, harming the Republicans’ ongoing efforts to investigate the Biden family’s business dealings while undermining potential impeachment efforts in the future.

At a closed-door meeting of the GOP conference on Capitol Hill, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) took the remarkable step of urging his troops to oppose the impeachment resolution when it hits the floor later in the week, a House Republican told The Hill.

McCarthy had urged Boebert to address the conference before making a privileged motion to bring her impeachment resolution to the floor, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) told The Hill. Boebert told McCarthy “she would think about doing it,” according to Greene, but went ahead with the privileged motion anyway.

“He urged her, ‘You need to address the conference over this before you do it,’ and she said she would think about doing it. And then she turned around and just went and introduced the privileged resolution right after that,” Greene said. 

Greene said McCarthy told the conference he had invited Boebert to speak during Wednesday’s closed-door meeting. The Colorado Republican, however, did not show up.

McCarthy told Republicans that he opposed the two impeachments of former President Trump because Democrats were acting on emotion, not facts, according to a source familiar with the Speaker’s remarks.

Boebert made a surprise privileged motion on Tuesday evening to bring up her resolution to impeach Biden over his handling of the U.S.-Mexico border, forcing a floor vote on the measure some time this week. Democrats plan to make a motion to table the resolution, blocking a vote on impeachment itself. The table resolution is expected to succeed. 

Boebert’s impeachment push comes as Republicans have tried to turn their attention to other Biden-focused criticism this week. After the president’s son, Hunter Biden, agreed to a plea deal involving federal tax and gun charges on Tuesday, Republicans dug in on their investigation into the business dealings of Biden’s family members.

It also follows Boebrt’s ideological ally, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), forcing a vote on censuring Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) over his handling of investigations into Trump. The House will vote Tuesday on a modified version of the resolution after 20 House Republicans helped to tank the Schiff censure resolution last week.

More privileged resolutions could be coming. Greene said that she will convert all her impeachment articles against Biden and top figures in his administration into privileged resolutions to use “when I feel it’s necessary.”

Republicans have spent years hammering Democrats for what they said were a pair of thinly-argued impeachment of Trump, and many are now warning that Boebert’s impeachment effort — which sidesteps all committee action — follows in the same flawed mold.

“This shouldn’t be playground games, in my view. This should be serious,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) groused Wednesday.  “If there’s real facts for impeachment then you go there. But doing this is wrong, and I think the majority of the conference feels that way.”

Bacon said there are “viable areas” of Biden’s background that merit investigation, but suggested there’s no proof of wrongdoing — at least not yet — to warrant impeachment.

“Impeachment shouldn’t be something that is frivolous,” he said. “We should get to the facts of that, but just doing a privileged motion is wrong,” he said. “It’s a person thinking about themselves instead of the team.”  

Others quickly piled on.  

“I think that things like impeachment are one of the most awesome powers of the Congress, it’s not something you should flippantly exercise in two days. And I think that it actually undermines efforts to hold people accountable in the future,” Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), a close McCarthy ally, told reporters.

He said the “right way” to go about the matter is through regular order, “empowering the committee chairs and members.”

“It’s important for the Republican conference to act together in unison to counter the bad policies of the Biden administration,” said Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.). “And therefore, if members want to suggest or bring up the idea of a privileged motion, they ought to come to the conference to discuss that in advance and have a collective discussion of it before they take the decision to do it.”

Greene said some members of the conference were mad at Boebert because her privileged motion “came out of nowhere.” And some of the criticism was personal. Greene, who has had public dust-ups with Boebert in the past, accused Boebert of copying her own impeachment push.

“I had already introduced articles of impeachment on Joe Biden for the border, asked her to co-sponsor mine, she didn’t. She basically copied my articles and then introduced them and then changed them to a privileged resolution,” Greene said. “So of course I support ‘em because they’re identical to mine.”

“They’re basically a copycat,” she added.

Not all Republicans were criticizing Boebert on Wednesday. Some conservatives defended her strategy, even as it would circumvent the conventional committee process they had demanded of GOP leaders this year. 

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) — the chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus who was one of several Republicans who pushed for regular order during the drawn-out Speaker’s race in January — argued that lawmakers were not trying to circumvent the process by bringing up privileged resolutions.

“Regular order also includes individual members being able to represent their districts,” Perry said. “[It] might not be what I do, but if that’s what they see as necessary then that’s their prerogative.”