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Questions Erupt After McCarthy’s Impeachment Inquiry – Can Biden Be Impeached for Something He Did BEFORE He Was President?

She's got a point.

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CNN’s Dana Bash seems to be as baffled as we are by the House’s impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden. After all, they seem to be using the inquiry to find some evidence that he did something worth impeaching him over. That’s not generally how it works. You need to have evidence he did something wrong before you start an impeachment.

But Bash took it a step further, questioning whether it’s “even a thing” to impeach someone for alleged behavior before they held the office of President. Appearing on Inside Politics, Bash said:

“The heart of the impeachment inquiry is about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. This is not about when, since Joe Biden has been president of the United States. This is pre that. And, so, another question is whether that’s even a thing. Can you impeach somebody, a president, for something that didn’t allegedly occur when he was president?”

Her point is valid, since the only things so far that Republicans have pointed to as possible reasons to impeach concern bribery and illicit activity involving his son Hunter — long before he was in the Oval Office.

So IS that a thing? Can you impeach a President for having done something before they were in office?

Ayesha Roscoe, another panelist on the show, weighed in:

“I mean, look. When you talk about lying to the American public, I mean…when President Trump was in office, the Stormy Daniels thing came up, and he said he didn’t know anything about the payments. Turns out that wasn’t true. But, you know, he wasn’t impeached for that, right?

Like this idea that things that you did before you were even president are now impeachable, I think at this point, impeachment has just become a political tool. Something that you do against the opposite party, and not something that really has much meaning.”

Unfortunately, Roscoe is right. The Republicans are still so angry that one of their own was impeached — even though there was PLENTY of evidence of the things Trump did — that they were determined to do it to the next Democrat in power.

Heck, Marjorie Taylor Greene filed impeachment paperwork the day President Biden took office.

So, to answer your question, Dana, no, it’s not a thing. It’s either not a thing or the entire GOP is made up entirely of hypocrites.

Andrew Simpson
meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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