A look at House GOP’s three impeachment projects

Congress faces a crushing to-do list that includes preventing a partial government shutdown in less than 10 days. Yet House Republicans are carving out time this week for a trio of impeachment projects centering on President Biden, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

• The House Judiciary Committee and the Oversight and Accountability Committee are set to vote today on a resolution holding Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify behind closed doors as part of Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into Biden.
• The House Homeland Security Committee will hold its first hearing on impeaching Mayorkas this morning.
• And Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) introduced a resolution on Tuesday evening calling for Austin’s impeachment for, in part, not moving sooner to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon as it flew over the United States last year. The resolution comes as Austin is facing criticism over failing to disclose to the White House or the public that he was hospitalized last week following complications from prostate cancer surgery.

In an interview on Newsmax on Monday, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) even raised the possibility of impeaching Attorney General Merrick Garland if Garland declines to prosecute Hunter Biden if the House votes to hold him in contempt.

House Republicans are relatively unified on the effort to impeach Mayorkas, even though Jonathan Turley, a law professor who has served as a GOP witness in congressional hearings, wrote yesterday in an op-ed for the Daily Beast that while Mayorkas may have failed at his job, there’s no evidence he committed an impeachable offense.

• “He can be legitimately accused of effectuating an open border policy, but that is a disagreement on policy that is traced to the President,” Turley argued.

House Republicans are less united on impeaching Biden, though all of them voted last month to open an impeachment inquiry into the president despite a lack of evidence that Biden committed high crimes or misdemeanors. (Former speaker Kevin McCarthy initially set the inquiry in motion in September without a vote.)

Asked Tuesday whether the House could handle two impeachments at the same time, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan told reporters, “We’ll find out.”

Democrats and the White House, meanwhile, have assailed the impeachment efforts as baseless.

“House Republicans are less than ten days from sparking a partial government shutdown that many of their extreme members are rooting for, but instead of working full-time to avoid it, they are wasting time on political stunts,” Ian Sams, a White House spokesman, told The Early on Tuesday in a statement.

And even some Republicans have expressed concern that two — or potentially three — impeachment efforts are overkill.

“I think that stuff is not going anywhere,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.). “I think there are enough distractions in general.”

Here’s what’s happening with each impeachment effort:

Republicans are moving to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress because he refused to sit for a deposition last month as part of the inquiry into his father. Hunter Biden volunteered to testify instead in a public hearing — an offer Republicans refused.

Hunter Biden’s defiance of the committee’s subpoenas “constitutes contempt of Congress and warrants referral to the appropriate United States Attorney’s Office for prosecution as prescribed by law,” Comer plans to say in the meeting today, according to excerpts of his remarks shared with The Early.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), the top Democrat on the committee, has bashed Comer for refusing to allow Hunter Biden to testify in public, which he described as Comer obstructing “his own hapless investigation.”

Unlike the Biden impeachment inquiry, “even vulnerable Republican lawmakers view the push to impeach Mayorkas as more politically palatable and have quickly coalesced around the effort, according to lawmakers and staffers involved with the latest impeachment target,” our colleagues Jackie Alemany and Marianna Sotomayor report.

Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R-N.Y.), a Homeland Security Committee member who represents a district Biden won by nearly 15 points in 2020, said Tuesday that he supports impeaching Mayorkas.

“It was a quality investigation,” D’Esposito said. “And I look forward to laying out all the facts for the rest of the members of the Republican conference and moving forward with the impeachment proceedings.”

But while D’Esposito voted for the Biden impeachment inquiry, he declined to endorse impeaching Biden or Austin for the moment.

• “It seems like we’re getting a little impeachment friendly,” he said.

The push to impeach Austin is the most nascent.

In a brief interview Tuesday shortly after he filed the resolution, Rosendale said he thought House Republicans could handle three impeachment efforts at once.

“I truly believe that they are all warranted,” Rosendale said.

Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, said he supported Rosendale’s effort. But Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), who leads the Republican Study Committee, another one of the “five families” of House Republicans, declined to endorse it Tuesday.

“I need to know more about it before I go out and say I support it,” Hern said.

Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley will face off one on one in Iowa tonight during CNN’s Republican primary debate, which comes only five days before the caucuses. Trump is scheduled to participate in a Fox News town hall at the same time.

One question on our mind is how successful Fox, which reached a $787.5 million settlement in a defamation suit over its 2020 election fraud claims, will be at limiting the spread of 2020-related conspiracy theories in a way that doesn’t upset Trump fans.

Both debates start at 9 p.m. Check out this visual on the importance of the Iowa caucuses while you wait.

Senate Republicans will meet today to discuss border policy negotiations.

The meeting was requested by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) before the holiday break that began in December. Bipartisan negotiations have stalled, in part, on the issue of humanitarian parole, an authority given to the president to determine that groups of people are able to be given temporary admission into the U.S. 

We are watching to see whether the stalemate in the negotiations softens. 

We’re watching to see how Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis responds to claims that she had an “improper” relationship with the Georgia election-interference case’s lead prosecutor, Nathan Wade, who has been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for his work. We’re also waiting to see whether Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee will grant a motion disqualifying the entire prosecution team from the case. 

• Background: Mike Roman, a co-defendant in the Georgia case, claims the indictment is tainted by the alleged ongoing relationship between Willis and Wade, which the filing described as a breach of professional ethics, our colleagues Holly Bailey and Amy Gardner report. 
• But as our colleagues note, “the filing did not offer evidence to back up those sensational claims.”
• “Separately, court records in Wade’s divorce case indicate that Willis was issued a subpoena Monday by Wade’s estranged wife to testify in the proceedings, which appear to have turned contentious…It is unknown what Willis will be asked or why she was deemed a potential witness.”

New Hampshire looms as Haley’s last chance to stop Trump

New Hampshire, a state where Nikki Haley has narrowed the gap with Trump, is shaping up to be “the most consequential early state — and perhaps the only shot to stop or slow Trump’s march to the GOP presidential nomination,” our colleagues Maeve Reston, Dylan Wells and Meryl Kornfield report.

But the former U.N. ambassador must overcome some major obstacles first:

Wild card: “Undeclared” voters.

• “One element of this cycle’s unpredictability is the outsize role that voters who are unaffiliated with either party could play in the GOP primary. … Those ‘undeclared’ voters — who span the ideological spectrum from libertarians to ardent Trump supporters alienated by the mainstream GOP to moderate voters who despise Trump — compose 39% of the electorate and can cast a ballot in either primary on Election Day.”

Chris Christie has split the vote.

• “With anti-Trump support splintering between her and Christie, there’s no guarantee that consolidation of the anti-Trump movement behind Haley will be enough to win.”

This isn’t the 2020/2016 Trump campaign. 

• Haley is up against the fervent energy of Trump’s supporters and the finely tuned ground game of his campaign, our colleagues report. Trump received a late Tuesday night endorsement from Sen. John Barrasso, the No. 3 Senate Republican. 

Trump is spending big on attack ads.

• “For the first time, Trump’s campaign is also now targeting Haley’s record on immigration and taxes on the airwaves, criticizing her rhetoric on immigration and attempting to portray her as ‘too liberal’ in a way that could hamper her momentum. While Haley’s campaign and SFA Inc., the super PAC allied with her campaign, had dominated New Hampshire media markets in November and December, ad spending by the Trump campaign and MAGA Inc., the super PAC supporting him, shot up at the end of December to match her efforts, according to data from AdImpact.”

Trump rhetoric, Republican candidates’ ads frighten immigrants in Iowa

Our colleagues Danielle Paquette and Sabrina Rodriguez take a look at how anti-migrant rhetoric — like Trump’s “poisoning the blood” comments — has unsettled immigrants living in Iowa. Danielle and Sabrina spoke to immigrants from Liberia, El Salvador and the Democratic Republic of Congo for this story. Here’s an excerpt: 

“As the race for the White House officially kicks off and GOP contenders jostle for votes before next week’s Iowa caucuses, people who’ve settled here from all over the world say the intensifying spotlight on border security and caustic language lobbed by Republican candidates has filled them with dread,” Danielle and Sabrina write.

• “The fire hose of campaign vitriol targeting ‘undocumented’ or ‘illegal’ migrants crushes room for nuanced debate, some say, threatening to demonize anyone who looks foreign. Naturalized citizens fear their neighbors might lump them in the same category as ‘criminals’ and ‘terrorists,’ and even those who agree with cracking down on unauthorized entry are disturbed by the relentless condemnation of people they see as fleeing danger or seeking a better life.”
• “I will use Trump’s own words: He will poison Americans’ mindsets,” Gloria Henriquez, 47, told our colleagues. “They will see an immigrant and say, ‘Oh, they ruin us.’”

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