House votes to refer Biden impeachment resolution to committee

By Kristin Wilson, Haley Talbot and Annie Grayer, CNN

(CNN) — The House voted Thursday to pass a rule sending a resolution offered by Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado to committee, effectively pausing a move to bring a privileged motion to the floor that would have forced members to vote on whether to impeach President Joe Biden.

The rule was passed along party lines.

Boebert’s resolution had divided House Republicans, with many members expressing frustration with the conservative congresswoman’s push to force a vote on the politically contentious issue. Speaker Kevin McCarthy urged his GOP conference to vote against the resolution.

Boebert said said she pushed the vote in order to force her colleagues “to make tough decisions.”

“I am a sophomore congresswoman, and I have learned very early that nothing happens in this town without force,” Boebert said.

At a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, McCarthy argued that Republicans should let committee investigations play out and warning that jumping to impeachment now could threaten their slim majority, multiple sources in the meeting told CNN.

“I think to prematurely bring something up like that, to have no background in it, it undercuts what we’re doing” at the committee level, McCarthy later told reporters.

A number of House Republicans have filed articles of impeachment against Biden since the party took the House majority, but Boebert made a specific procedural move on Tuesday that would force the chamber to vote on the impeachment of Biden this week.Some House Republicans have raised concerns about their right-wing colleagues using procedural methods to bypass the committee process and force votes on the floor, particularly after they had harped on Congress returning to regular order as part of their demands in exchange for electing McCarthy as speaker earlier this year.

House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green said that the committee will make Biden a focus of their investigation into the southern border, after the House approved the rule referring an impeachment resolution to his panel.

“There’s not going to be that much of a change other than we’ll dig into the actual actions of the president in conjunction with what’s happened,” Green said.

Green declined to say whether or not he believes Biden’s actions on the border meet the threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors for impeachment, but he said that would be part of what they investigate.

The committee has already begun an investigation into the administration’s handling of the border as Republicans have called for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to be impeached over the matter. Green suggested that Biden’s actions will be added to that probe.

Boebert threatened to force a vote on impeaching Biden if she believes the committee isn’t conducting its investigation quickly.

“If I don’t see accountability taking place with Joe Biden in a timely manner – and no, I don’t have a date, deadline – but if I see that this has been slow rolled and nothing is moving on it, then there’s always the option to bring up another privileged resolution and call to impeach Joe Biden,” she said.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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CNN’s Manu Raju and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.