US Constitution Archives

Republicans filed impeachment articles on Biden before he was sworn into office.

Republicans have openly admitted that their efforts to impeach President Joe Biden — which will begin in earnest this week as House members return to DC from summer break — are in bad faith. They don’t just want to tarnish Biden. They want to tarnish the impeachment process itself.

As the GOP has become increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic, Republicans have become increasingly committed to undermining and mocking forms of democratic accountability. A nakedly partisan and clownish impeachment is useful because it signals to voters that all impeachments are clown shows, and all impeachments are partisan. That exculpates former President Donald Trump and delegitimizes resistance to him should he win the presidency again.

By September 2022, Republicans in the then-Democratic-controlled House had initiated no less than nine impeachment resolutions.

Some of these resolutions proposed impeaching Biden for (supposedly) failing to control immigration on the Mexican border. Others focused on disputes over the handling of the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Still, others were based on Republican claims that Biden’s moratorium on evictions during the pandemic was unconstitutional.

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The GOP’s impeachment push is an attack on democracy

An interactive guide to rights the Supreme Court has established — and could take away.

Last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion established 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade, raising concerns about the future of other rights rooted in Supreme Court rulings. Although most rights are secured by statutes and regulations, others are guarantees extrapolated by the court from the often abstract language of the Constitution. Some of these are recent rights, like the right to carry a handgun in public. But many are longstanding, like the right to be read a Miranda warning by police before being interrogated, and trace their origins to the liberal majorities that presided on the court from the 1950s through the 1970s, an era often called the “rights revolution.” Because these rights were established by the court, the court alone gets to decide whether to preserve, shrink or unmake them.

Right to have police advise you of your rights

To get a better sense of which rights may be at risk — in whole or in part — ProPublica scoured judicial opinions, academic articles, and public remarks by sitting justices. Some justices, like Clarence Thomas, have had decades-long careers and lengthy paper trails. By contrast, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the newest justice, has almost no prior record. We found dozens of rights that at least one sitting justice has questioned:

Tag: US Constitution

The GOP’s impeachment push is an attack on democracy

Supreme Risk

An interactive guide to rights the Supreme Court has established — and could take away.