Rep. Hill Advises GOP to Avoid Replicating Pelosi’s Impeachment Errors

The House should not “repeat the mistakes” that Democrats made with their impeachment inquiries into former President Donald Trump when considering whether to do the same to President Joe Biden, Rep. French Hill told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

The Arkansas Republican said, “We don’t want to repeat the mistakes we think that [former House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi made by prematurely moving to impeachment during the Trump administration.”

Hill said he believes that neither House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., nor House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, have “even remotely completed” the probes into the foreign business dealings of the Biden family. 

“I don’t believe they’ve even remotely completed their work on the kind of detailed investigations and quality work that Speaker [Kevin] McCarthy is expecting both those committees to produce before someone goes to, you know, an impeachment activity,” Hill said.

However, McCarthy, R-Calif., has indicated that the House could hold a vote to start an impeachment inquiry as soon as this month, despite hesitation from some Republican moderates, according to The Hill. Comer and other Republicans argue that such a move would give them more tools with which to investigate.

This also comes as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., pledges that she won’t vote for government funding without an impeachment inquiry as the threat of a government shutdown looms at the end of this month.

But Hill insisted that Democrats currently have the upper hand in negotiations over spending, because the Democrat-controlled Senate has advanced all 12 funding bills, while the deadlocked House, controlled by Republicans, has passed only one bill. 

“So that gives them [the Senate] a distinct advantage over the House in the negotiation for 2024 spending details,” Hill told “Face the Nation.” He added that “if we want to merit that and have the right kind of negotiation that House conservatives want, then we need to come together and pass those 11 bills as soon as possible,” stressing that is the way to have the appropriate “negotiating clout.”