Not That Difficult

Here's Biden's problem, and I think it's clear enough that even he recognizes it. The slimmest of Democrat majorities in Congress have shielded him from investigations over the past two years. If he loses either house in the November elections, Republicans will control key oversight committees with subpoena power, which will at best threaten his prospects in 2024 -- but there are potential avenues of investigation that could reach a "Nixon standard". This phrase has come up in connection with potential Trump offenses that could have been uncovered in the Mar-a-Lago raid (but so far have not) -- but I'm not the only one who's seen parallels between Nixon and Biden as well.

A quick web search suggests that there's never been a clear definition of a "Nixon standard" for impeachment, but of course, Nixon was never impeached, so his case can't be a precedent anyhow. Nevertheless, legal scholars in the Clinton impeachment came up with this definition as it was developed by congressional staff in the Nixon investigation:

Impeachment is a constitutional remedy addressed to serious offenses against the system of government. . . . It is not controlling whether treason and bribery are criminal. More important, they are constitutional wrongs that subvert the structure of government, or undermine the integrity of office and even the Constitution itself, and thus are `high' offenses in the sense that word was used in English impeachments.

The "smoking gun" allegation against Nixon involved his attempt to use the CIA to convince the FBI not to investigate the Watergate burglary:

A secretly recorded conversation between President Richard Nixon and his aide H.R. Haldeman on June 23, 1972, reveals the president's involvement in the Watergate break-ins and cover-up. During the conversation, which became known as the "Smoking Gun," Nixon and Haldeman discuss telling Deputy CIA Director Vernon Walters to interfere with FBI Acting Director Pat Gray's investigation.

There was never a House vote to impeach Nixon on this allegation, and never a Senate trial, but the evidence was felt at the time by senior Republicans to be sufficient that they should urge him to resign in the face of likely impeachment and conviction, which he did.

Right now, there are two potential avenues of investigation that could reach this "Nixon standard". The first would be if it were provable that Biden ordered an investigation, including a raid on Mar-a-Lago, that would lead to an indictment of Trump on nearly any grounds short of deliberately passing secret information to Putin for the purpose of undermining the US. This is highly unlikely, and an indictment short of that would be an extreme gamble for Biden that would likely fail.

The second, which has developed more recently, is any Biden involvement in using the government to pressure private media to censor COVID information:

[N]ew evidence suggests a much wider campaign by his administration to sic Big Tech on critics than previously thought, going so far as removing a parody of Biden's chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci.

The First Amendment lawsuit by Republican attorneys general and a civil liberties group against Biden, Fauci and several other high-level officials has revealed a "massive, sprawling federal 'Censorship Enterprise'" related to COVID-19 and elections, the plaintiffs said in a 711-page "joint statement on discovery disputes."

"If there was ever any doubt the federal government was behind censorship of Americans who dared to dissent from official Covid messaging, that doubt has been erased" by what the defendants have already turned over, New Civil Liberties Alliance lawyer Jenin Younes said.

A third potential issue might be an "Agnew standard":

Agnew’s downfall began in the summer of 1973, when he was investigated in connection with accusations of extortion, bribery, and income-tax violations relating chiefly to his tenure as governor of Maryland. Faced with federal indictments, Agnew fought the charges, arguing that the allegations were false, that a sitting vice president could not be indicted, and that the only way he could be removed from office was by impeachment. . . . secret plea bargaining took place between Agnew’s lawyers and a federal judge. Agnew resigned the vice presidency on October 10, 1973, and appeared in United States District Court in Baltimore on the same day to plead nolo contendere to a single federal count of failing to report on his income-tax return $29,500 in income that he had received in 1967, while governor of Maryland. Acknowledging that the plea amounted to a felony conviction, Agnew declared that he had resigned in the national interest. He was fined $10,000 and sentenced to three years of unsupervised probation.

In Biden's case, there's the potential for equivalent tax violations in the numerous questionable business deals engineered by his son Hunter. A forced resignation on this basis would be pretextual, but if Republicans are able to get a special prosecutor appointed for Hunter's transactions, this would be another potential outcome for Biden.

I'm occasionally beginning to see remarks that Biden is already running against Trump for 2024, but what I think is really happening is Biden sees threats to his tenure before then if Republicans gain control of either house in 2022.

But the national mood is changing as well. Media across the spectrum is less of a monolith, with CNN moving to the center, the intramural dispute over Live PD, and of all things the departure of extreme never-Trumper Allahpundit from the never Trump Hot Air blog as of today, which I suspect is further fallout from Liz Cheney's electoral defeat.

And Trump is still a contender, with Biden's current effort against him having the counterproductive effect of putting him in the national spotlight. He's already testing a 2024 platform of pardoning the January 6 defendants with an apology.