House Speaker Mike Johnson's support for an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden by the GOP majority House of Representatives has drawn renewed scrutiny into how he felt about Donald Trump's two impeachments and his remarkable change of heart about the "damage" — his words — it would inflict on the country.
The Louisiana Republican, who rose from obscurity to become the top Republican in the House after former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was dethroned by a far-right faction in his own caucus, was initially skeptical about a Biden impeachment back in November, reportedly agreeing with some colleagues "that Biden's poll numbers are already weak, so there's less of a need politically to impeach him."
Now, after giving a thumbs-up to House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) to proceed, comments made by Johnson in 2019 about Trump's second impeachment have resurfaced.
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As CNN's KFiles is reporting, Johnson told an interviewer, "If you don’t like the president, he goes on a ballot again after four years. We have an election in 11 months. Let the people decide this.”
In that same interview with KEEL 710 radio, he added, "What happens a few years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? You have a Democrat in the White House and you have a Republican majority in the House. Do you think the Republican base in the country is gonna be satisfied? They’re gonna demand that they be impeached because you’ve now set the bar so low that we’re going into tribal politics now. I mean, if you think politics were divided before this, heaven help us.”
The CNN report adds, "Now Johnson, as the speaker of the House, seems to have abandoned his previous concerns about impeachment, and — with Republicans in control of the House — has said he fully supports such an inquiry along party lines and so close to a presidential election."
A spokesperson for Johnson's office pushed back, stating, "The Speaker’s commentary on the House Democrat impeachment effort was true then and is true now. The 2019 impeachment of President Trump remains infamous for using the thinnest evidentiary record and narrowest grounds ever to impeach a President. Today, the House is taking a decidedly different approach. The House will depose witnesses, gather evidence, establish a record, and only present Articles if the evidentiary record supports such action.”
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