Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said this week that President Joe Biden will not be impeached or removed from office over his disastrous handling of the Afghanistan troop withdrawal despite efforts by House Republicans to kickstart impeachment proceedings.
Instead, Americans should hold the president accountable at the “ballot box” in the 2022 midterm and 2024 presidential elections.
McConnell was largely stating what has been obvious to Republicans, given that the party controls neither the House nor the Senate. To impeach Biden over his Afghanistan debacle, the GOP would need to organize impeachment hearings and a vote on impeachment articles in the House — currently controlled by Democrats — and would need to win a subsequent trial in the Senate, which is split 50-50 with the tiebreaker vote going to the Democrat Vice President, Kamala Harris.
“Well, look the president is not going to be removed from office,” McConnell admitted.
“I think the way these behaviors get adjusted in this country is at the ballot box,” he said, per the Wall Street Journal. ‘There isn’t going to be an impeachment.”
“His comments have come as House Republicans have been lining up to call for Biden’s impeachment – although their efforts are likely doomed in the Democratic-controlled House and would face difficult odds in the 50-50 Senate,” the Daily Mail noted.
Calls for impeachment ramped up Wednesday following a report that Biden spoke with the then-Afghan president Ashraf Ghani in July, urging Ghani to correct what Biden called a “perception problem” in world media that the Taliban was gaining ground in Afghanistan.
“I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,” Biden said, per reports. “And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”
Just weeks later, the Taliban would blitz into Kabul, the country’s capital city, and Ghani would be on the run, having abandoned his country to the Taliban’s mercy.
Critics now claim that Biden’s call to Ghani indicates that he knew in July that the Afghan army’s fight against the Taliban was not going well and that Kabul’s fall could have been reasonably predicted from available information.
The administration has repeatedly claimed that the Taliban’s blitz into Kabul was unforeseeable and that the ensuing scramble to evacuate thousands of American passport holders, green card holders, Afghan allies, and their families — a scramble that was marked by a shocking terror attack that left 13 U.S. service members dead — was unavoidable. The shortened timeline also limited the Biden administration’s evacuation capabilities, the president has argued, and as a result, around 200 Americans remain in Afghanistan, trapped behind enemy lines.
In a speech Tuesday, Biden congratulated his administration for a job well done in Afghanistan before laying the blame for the bungled withdrawal at the feet of the previous administration.
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Source: Dailywire
