The politically inspired impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden has failed to produce any convincing evidence that Biden has committed the “high crimes and misdemeanors” required by the U.S. Constitution for the conviction and removal of a chief executive. So naturally Speaker Mike Johnson is proposing a floor vote to authorize the inquiry as a “necessary step.”

Johnson attempted to justify a vote by the full House — which should have been taken months ago as a procedural matter — as a response to supposed White House stonewalling. But it’s hard not to see it as the latest attempt by the House Republicans leadership to placate the far-right cohort of their conference and Trump cultists in the party at large.

Deposed Speaker Kevin McCarthy launched the Biden impeachment inquiry in September without securing a floor vote, thus avoiding a scenario in which saner members of his fragile majority — including Republicans elected in districts where Biden is popular — might rebel. Those same Republicans should join Democrats in denying legitimacy to this impeachment circus by voting no.

Despite questions about the business dealings of Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and aspersions cast on what Republicans call “the Biden crime family,” no proof has been offered that President Joe Biden benefited from his son’s business dealings or shaped U.S. policy because of them.

Testimony by Devon Archer, a former Hunter Biden associate, spectacularly failed to substantiate allegations that President Biden had any significant involvement in his son’s business affairs. Republicans also seem to be trying to breathe new life into a claim, debunked long ago, that as vice president Biden pushed for the dismissal of a Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, because Shokin was investigating Burisma, a company on whose board Hunter Biden served. In fact, the Obama administration’s campaign against Shokin was part of a multinational effort to press Ukraine to deal with corruption.

Finally, on Monday the House Oversight Committee announced portentously that Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco PC, which had received payments from foreign companies, had made monthly payments to Joe Biden. Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said the payments “are now part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes.”

But the Washington Post reported that the payments – made in 2018, when Joe Biden was a private citizen – were reimbursements for a truck Biden helped his financially strapped son to purchase.

““There Chairman Comer goes again – reheating what is old as new to try to revive his sham of an investigation,” Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden’s attorney, said in a statement to the Washington Post. “The truth is Hunter’s father helped him when he was struggling financially due to his addiction and could not secure credit to finance a truck. When Hunter was able to, he paid his father back and took over the payments himself.”

The details of the overblown allegations against the president are almost beside the point, which is that the faltering impeachment inquiry is best viewed as an exercise in toadying to former President Trump, who has accused Biden of being “the most corrupt president we’ve ever had.” House Republicans faced with a vote on legitimizing this fishing expedition should ask themselves if it’s their interests to climb aboard this particular carriage in the Trump train.

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