House Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced an impeachment trial against President Joe Biden but has faced the wrath of the radical wing of the Republican Party, which wants to replace him.
McCarthy had a difficult election for the position of Speaker of the House of Representatives, as he only managed to be elected after several rounds of voting and after making many promises and concessions to the party’s most radical, far-right wing.
This wing – which is close to former President Donald Trump and who believes that he never accepted Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election as valid – showed great resistance in choosing McCarthy, despite this congressman’s of the elections was almost approved. Republican bench of the Chamber of Representatives, forcing him to promise that he would resign if he did not meet a demanding political specification.
The radical wing even managed to get McCarthy to accept a clause under which any member can request a vote to remove him from office at any time if he is dissatisfied with the speaker’s performance.
Months later, McCarthy faced intense criticism from radical Republicans when he agreed to approve a Democratic budget plan in Congress last June to prevent the government’s financial collapse.
To stay in office, McCarthy promised at the time that he would be more demanding in his oversight of the White House and that he would do everything he could to initiate a process to impeach Biden, who at the time was already suspected of involvement in his presidency. his son’s shady foreign business dealings.
This month, as soon as Congress reopened, the Republican majority leader announced that his group would launch a lawsuit to impeach the president, claiming that “he had lied about his knowledge of his family’s affairs abroad.”
McCarthy made no secret of the fact that he made this decision with reservations, agreeing with members of his party that the evidence against the president was scanty and poorly substantiated.
So far, Republicans only have records of a few phone conversations in which Biden, then Barack Obama’s vice president, warmly greeted some businessmen with connections to his son Hunter, who wanted to develop business in Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine.
With this impeachment, McCarthy tried to calm his relations with the radical wing of his party, giving them the political weapon that Donald Trump had expressly requested in an attempt to weaken the Democratic re-candidacy in the next presidential elections.
Yet McCarthy made it clear that he would only pursue this impeachment process with the approval of a comfortable majority in the House of Representatives, and never with the exclusive votes of Republicans.
This decision did not please the most radical members, close to Trump, such as Matt Gaetz, elected from Florida and one of the most ardent supporters of the ex-president, who has already announced that he will ask for McCarthy’s removal if he does not goes further. with the impeachment trial against Biden even with a simple majority in the House.
The party is also not happy with the fact that McCarthy has not found a workable plan that avoids another shutdown of the government budget without giving in to the spending ambitions of the Democrats in the White House.
For the time being, the Republican chairman has managed to negotiate a financial package that will allow him to gain some time on this issue, about a month, in an initiative that was accepted by the radical wing and the moderate conservatives, but which may not benefit the Democrats comes.
Therefore, McCarthy may face the challenge of having his position as majority leader questioned and even re-voted if he fails to strike the difficult balance between pleasing several conflicting parties.
Source: DN
