A freshman member of Congress has drafted articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden, alleging that Biden has abused his executive branch powers by conditioning the transfer of some U.S. weapons to Israel.
Earlier this week, Biden announced that he wouldn’t send certain types of bombs to Israel if the country began a “major” invasion of Rafah in Gaza. (Notably, at the time of Biden’s statement, two Israeli military brigades were already on the ground in Rafah, with dozens of people killed.) The president also appeared to admit that Israel has committed war crimes using U.S. weapons, though he didn’t explicitly use the phrase “war crimes.”
“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which [Israeli officials] go after population centers,” Biden said in an interview with CNN.
Since October, Israel’s genocide has killed at least 35,400 Palestinians in Gaza, more than 40 percent of whom were children. Thousands more are unaccounted for and are believed to be buried under the rubble.
Rep. Cory Mills (R-Florida) expressed his opposition to Biden’s action on Thursday, saying that he planned to submit articles of impeachment against the president.
In his draft, Mills charges Biden with an “abuse of power” for “solicit[ing] a ‘quid pro quo’ with the foreign government of Israel by withholding precision guided weapons shipments in order to try and extract military policy changes.”
Mills — a GOP lawmaker who raised eyebrows early in his tenure for handing out grenades as gifts to his colleagues after being sworn in — compared his current calls for impeachment to the 2019 impeachment inquiry against Trump after the former president threatened to withhold weapons from Ukraine unless the country’s leaders found him dirt on Biden in the run-up to the 2020 election.
“These are the same accusations made against President Trump, which resulted in his impeachment by Democrats. The same must happen for Joe Biden, which is why we’re drawing up articles of impeachment now,” Mills said.
Mills’s comparison suggests that his proposed impeachment articles are retaliatory and politically motivated. It also ignores major differences between the two situations: Critically, Biden’s recent action — likely an attempt to mitigate the political fallout stemming from his support of Israel’s genocide — is in accordance with U.S. law, which forbids the transfer of weapons or military aid to countries that will use those weapons to commit war crimes. Trump’s threats to withhold weapons from Ukraine, meanwhile, were illegal and done behind closed doors, only becoming public due to a whistleblower.
Comparing the two presidents’ actions “is not a serious argument,” MSNBC producer Steve Benen wrote in an opinion piece for the publication. “There’s nothing illegal about Biden’s policy, and he’s not trying to leverage security aid for campaign help.”
Mills’s measure marks the seventh impeachment resolution against Biden that Republicans currently have pending in the House of Representatives. Earlier this year, an impeachment inquiry approved by Republicans fizzled out after it became clear that a key witness had lied to investigators about the alleged misdeeds that Biden had supposedly engaged in.
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