Republican Senator Admits There’s “No Evidence”on Biden Impeachment

Senator Chuck Grassley admitted on Wednesday that House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden hasn’t produced any facts pointing to wrongdoing on the president’s part.

“I have no evidence of it,” Grassley told CNN, just hours before House Republicans were set to vote to formalize the Biden impeachment inquiry. “I’m just going to follow the facts where they are, and the facts haven’t taken me to that point where I can say the president is guilty of anything.”

The probe into Biden, which was sparked by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy in September and based on debunked claims, initially went ahead without a floor vote and failed to produce even one witness who could say Joe Biden did anything illegal. Republicans repeatedly tried and failed to tie the president to the business dealings of his son Hunter Biden.

The House is slated to cast a floor vote sometime on Wednesday to formalize the impeachment proceedings into Joe Biden, though it’s expected to be close. The lower chamber’s already slim conservative majority was squeezed even tighter earlier this month after New York Representative George Santos was expelled from the chamber. The disgraced politician’s absence means that the party can only afford to lose three Republicans on any given vote.

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Christian fundamentalism is even too much for his own family, who say that the leader of the House’s religiosity has stood between them and environmental aid, citing an instance nine years ago when Johnson outright rejected their cry for help regarding a toxic burn site just miles away from their family home.

In 2014, the future speaker’s father, Patrick Johnson, and his wife, Janis Gabriel, both turned staunch environmental activists after the elder Johnson survived a near-fatal industrial explosion, visited his son’s legal office with a plea: Stop a government-backed burn of 15 million pounds’ worth of toxic munitions at Camp Minden.

But Johnson wouldn’t hear them out, according to Gabriel. “His father and I went to him and said: ‘Mike you need to get involved in this, this is really important. Your family really lives at ground zero,’” Gabriel told The Guardian. “We basically begged him to say something, to someone, somewhere.”

Johnson, who was a prominent right-wing lawyer at the time, wouldn’t budge.

“It just blew my mind that he wouldn’t give five minutes of his time to the effort,” she said. “He basically shut us down.”

According to Gabriel, Johnson has never been interested in environmental causes—a political preference due to his creationist beliefs, which lead him to think that climate change is a function of the planet’s shifting cycles rather than a manmade crisis.

“The climate is changing, but the question is: Is the climate changing because of the natural cycles of the atmosphere over the span of history, or is it changing because we drive SUVs?” Johnson said to the sound of boos during a town hall in his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2017. “I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.”

The elder Johnson, who passed away in 2016, “certainly didn’t agree” with Mike Johnson’s “extremist stance” on Christianity, Gabriel said. The father and son also disagreed on Donald Trump.

Gabriel explained that her impetus for speaking with the outlet was to elucidate “what and who he is and how that will affect the job he’s doing for us,” and noted that she believed it was Johnson’s extreme faith that led him to spurn his father’s cry for help over the air pollution crisis in the representative’s congressional district.

“It speaks to those religious beliefs,” Gabriel told The Guardian. “‘Don’t take care of the environment because we have a finite amount of time here and God will take care of you.’ It’s crazy.”

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that would decide the fate of the “abortion pill.”

It will be the biggest reproductive rights case that the court’s conservative supermajority has seen since it overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

At stake is access to a drug called mifepristone, which, along with misoprostol, comprises one-half of a two-pill prescription jointly referred to as “the abortion pill.” Together, they account for more than half of all the abortions in the United States, according to a 2022 report by the Guttmacher Institute.

In April, a Trump-appointed judge in a lower court halted access to the drug. Four months later, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the plaintiffs, the right-wing Christian organization Alliance Defending Freedom, ruling that while the pill was safe for market, the Food and Drug Administration had overstepped its role by taking several steps that expanded access to the drug in 2016. That included allowing women to access it 10 weeks into pregnancy instead of seven, lowering the standard dosage, and allowing the prescription to be accessed via telemedicine.

Until now, none of those changes have been felt thanks to a Supreme Court stay on the case. But now that the nation’s highest court has decided to review it, that could change.

And the Christian legal group leading the charge against mifepristone would like to see more than just a few nicks to its access—instead, it’s aiming for a complete ban that questions the FDA’s initial approval of the drug in 2000, according to court filings.

A decision in the case is expected by summer.

The chair of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, is apparently afraid to go up against even the mildest of criticism as he pushes the GOP forward with a symbolic impeachment vote of Joe Biden, telling Newsmax host Eric Bolling that he won’t even dare to go on Fox.

On Monday, Fox anchor Steve Doocy suggested on Fox & Friends that the probe, which hasn’t produced one fact witness who could say Joe Biden did anything illegal and has tried and failed to tie the president into the business dealings of his son Hunter Biden, was meritless.

“They’ve connected the dots, the Department of Justice did, on Hunter, but they have not shown where Joe Biden, you know, did anything illegally,” Doocy said on the network before being harangued by his colleagues.

Thanks to that tiny hole in the conservative safety net that is Fox News, Comer jumped ship to Newsmax on Wednesday, claiming that Doocy’s dissenting opinion is too threatening.

“He’s had that position from the very beginning,” Comer told Bolling. “I’ve quit going on Fox & Friends because of Doocy, you know? I mean, he’s the one guy on Fox that’s been very critical of the investigation. I have my theory why, and we’ll talk about that at a later point, but at the end of the day, he’s entitled to his opinion, but I don’t think the average viewer of Fox News agrees with Doocy one bit.”

But if Comer is too afraid to face down Fox News for even the mildest bout of criticism, what does that mean for the actual impeachment proceedings, which Republicans seemingly want to keep in the dark?

Last week, the caucus threatened to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress if he refused to appear for a closed door deposition, despite the president’s son’s previously voiced preference for a public hearing, fearing that information from those interviews would be selectively leaked and used to “manipulate, even distort, the facts and misinform the American public.”

The House is expected to cast a floor vote sometime on Wednesday to formalize the impeachment proceedings into Joe Biden.

House Speaker Mike Johnson once warned about the exact impeachment strategy his party is now pursuing against Joe Biden.

In a video from 2019 recently resurfaced by MSNBC, Johnson raises concerns about Democrats opening an impeachment inquiry against Trump along party lines, as well as an impeachment happening within a year of a presidential election.

Johnson also warned that the Founding Fathers would have been against Trump’s impeachment because they believed a “single-party impeachment” would divide Americans.

“The Founding Fathers warned us,” Johnson said in 2019.

The House plans on authorizing Biden’s impeachment inquiry on Wednesday.