President Joe Biden will not be impeached, the top Republican in the Senate said Wednesday.
“The president is not going to be removed from office with a Democratic House and a narrowly Democratic Senate. That’s not going to happen,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said at an event in his home state when asked whether the president’s behavior should trigger an impeachment.
“I think the way these behaviors get adjusted in this country is at the ballot box,” he added. “There isn’t going to be an impeachment.”
Democrats control the House of Representatives with a 220–212 majority while holding a slim one-vote majority in the upper chamber with the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Impeachment requires a simple majority in the House and a supermajority conviction vote in the Senate.
Former President Donald Trump was impeached twice but both times the Senate voted to acquit him. No president in history has been impeached and convicted.
Some Republicans have charged that Biden’s conduct regarding Afghanistan has been impeachable, and there have been calls for senior Biden administration officials to step down.
“I think it’s dereliction of duty to leave hundreds of Americans behind enemy lines, turn them into hostages, to abandon thousands of Afghans who fought honorably along our side, to create conditions for another 9/11 that are now through the roof,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on CBS on Sunday.
Biden must resign or be impeached, Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) added on Twitter.
And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) last week introduced three impeachment resolutions against the president over the Afghanistan debacle.
But no Democrats support the calls, making the efforts unlikely to succeed, unless Republicans flip both chambers in 2022.
No Biden administration officials have yet resigned over Afghanistan. Some lawmakers have called for Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley to step down or be removed.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki, when asked about the calls last week, said that “It’s not a day for politics.”
She deflected a similar query the following day, saying that everybody should be supportive of U.S. efforts to target the terrorists who were behind the bombing attack in Kabul that left 13 U.S. troops dead.
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