Republicans on Capitol Hill could soon take a respite from infighting over President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful" budget bill to focus on a point of party unity: investigations into former President Joe Biden's cognitive fitness while in office.
As competing factions within the GOP remain divided over the budget reconciliation bill to fund Trump's legislative agenda and the public breakdown of the president's relationship with former ally Elon Musk, multiple Republican-led investigations both in Congress and in the White House are heating up.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a co-leader of one of the congressional probes, told the Washington Examiner that the issue of who was calling the shots during the previous Democrat administration goes "beyond just the politics" and raises "constitutional issues."
Trump and Republican lawmakers have argued that presidential pardons and executive orders signed with the autopen during Biden's term are not valid if the former president was mentally unable to understand what was being authorized under his signature.
"The whole country watched the decline," Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who is co-leading the investigation with Cornyn, told the Examiner of Biden. "Many were in denial. This guy had the nuclear codes and got lost in the bathroom. It's very concerning, I think, as a constitutional issue."
Schmitt and Cornyn will reportedly lead a June 18 Senate hearing that will pave the way for future Republican inquires into whether Biden was cognitively fit to lead the nation as president.
An Examiner source told the outlet that CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson, who co-authored a book on Biden's decline, the effort to conceal it and his decision to run for reelection, rejected Cornyn's invitation to appear as witnesses at the hearing. While other potential witnesses are unknown, they are likely to include members of the media and legal experts, the source said.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., is also working to glean information behind the scenes, seeking interviews with 28 current and former Biden aides on the former president's health while in office. The perennial debate on the subject resurfaced last month when Biden announced he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to the bone.
In the House, Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., is conducting a probe on Biden's use of the autopen and whether it was used by White House staffers without the then-president's knowledge. The Democrat's physician has been subpoenaed by Comer to sit for a deposition later this month.
There's also reportedly some concern among Republicans that the investigations are overly broad in scope or overlapping and that congressional inquiries could be eclipsed by the Justice Department's own probe of Biden's health and the alleged cover-up that was ordered by Trump to determine if his predecessor was really running the country.
"I hope what doesn't happen is somebody just jumps to a show-trial type of hearing without documentation, without having done the work, without having talked to people separately, see what stories jive, and which ones don't," Johnson said. "I've found coordinating investigations between House and Senate don't work too well. … It's even a little dicey between Congress and the administration."
While Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has said that questions about Biden's use of the autopen are "valid" and "reasonable," he also suggested that other aspects of the investigation could be "overly broad."Paul is one of the upper chamber's leading fiscal hawks and a sharp critic of Trump's "big, beautiful bill."
Meanwhile, Democrats say that their Republican colleagues' focus on Biden is nothing more than an attempt to distract Americans from their governing woes.
"You can tell things are going poorly for Republicans when they throw out their [expletive], and there are clear efforts to distract the public from their terrible [expletive]," Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Del., said. "That's what this is."
Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, told the Examiner that the GOP investigations are "to distract from their incompetence and their cruelty."
"That's all this is — a waste of time, a waste of money," McGovern said.
Nicole Weatherholtz ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.