T. S. Eliot wrote a poem that seems entirely appropriate to quote from today, since it aptly sums up the Republican effort in the House of Representatives to find something -- anything! -- to use to impeach President Joe Biden. After more than a year of digging, they have found less than nothing. Their one crown jewel of an accusation was brought by a man who is now being charged with lying about the entire thing to the F.B.I. Which is why the final lines of "The Hollow Men" seemed appropriate to quote (emphasis in original):

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but with a whimper.

Or you can go back to the beginning of the poem, if you'd like a description of the Republicans mightily trying to make their fantastical dark vision somehow true:

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

As I said, it just seems appropriate.

When the Republicans took back control of the House in the midterm elections, they threw themselves into investigating anything and everything about Joe Biden and anyone connected to him. This was a fairly transparent attempt to provide Donald Trump with some payback for being the only United States president to be impeached not just once but two times. Now that Republicans controlled the House, they could repay the favor and impeach Biden at least once, to allow Trump to spread a dose of false equivalence over the presidential campaign.

That was the way the plan was supposed to work, at any rate. After all, as Gerald Ford famously said: "An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history." With a majority of Republicans heavily influenced by Donald Trump, that could mean anything under the sun, right?

Well, no. Not yet, at any rate. As things stand, it is now an open question whether the committees investigating Biden will even bring impeachment articles to the House floor at all. Because they don't have the votes -- there are still House Republicans who have some standards for what constitutes an impeachable offense, and they haven't been convinced yet. And that was before their single piece of "evidence" collapsed so spectacularly last week.

This "evidence" came in the form of a report from an F.B.I. informant who spun a tall tale about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden both getting paid $5 million each from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, ostensibly to get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired. In the GOP's fantastical telling of this tale, Burisma was worried that the prosecutor was pressuring them and investigating their corruption, so paying off the Bidens to get rid of him would have benefited the company.

The only problem with this story is that every single thing about it is wrong. In the first place, the informant lied about the $5 million payments -- no corroboration of such payments has ever emerged. The informant lied about meetings that did not take place, his role in the whole scheme, and pretty much everything else he told the F.B.I. as well. In the second place, the entire idea is absurd on the face of it. It has been established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the prosecutor was actually known world-wide for turning a blind eye to Ukrainian corruption, and while the official American policy (not just some rogue operation by Joe Biden) was indeed to pressure the country to remove him -- it was for not prosecuting any corruption. Burisma had nothing to worry about, in other words. If they were corrupt, it was just fine that the prosecutor stay where he was, so that no corruption investigations would ever be launched. The Republican version simply makes no sense.

But that hasn't stopped them from pushing forward. They simply don't care about actual facts. They keep making accusations about Joe Biden somehow accepting bribes from foreign governments while he was out of office, for instance. Which, again, makes no sense at all. There would have been no way for Joe Biden to provide any quid pro quo while he was a private citizen and while a Republican was in the White House, obviously. But the House Republicans don't care about such basic facts.

The committee keeps calling witnesses, in the forlorn hope that sooner or later one of them will confirm their fantastical beliefs. So far, everyone with direct knowledge of the business workings of the Biden family has firmly denied Joe had anything to do with any business his brother James or his son Hunter conducted with anybody. There is no evidence of Joe Biden participating in or profiting from anything the other members of his family did, plain and simple. James Biden testified before the committee today and said exactly the same thing as all the other people directly involved has said: Joe wasn't part of anything, period. "Joe Biden has never had any involvement or any direct or indirect financial interest" in any of his business ventures over the past 50 years, James said today. "None."

But the Republicans keep hoping. Sooner or later, they'll turn up something, right? Well... let's go back to that poem again:

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

For months and months, Republicans have been holding up the F.B.I. informant's tall tale as Gospel truth. They said it "proved" Joe Biden is corrupt and took a big fat bribe to do the bidding of a foreign energy company. But that cellar ran dry last week when the informant was arrested and charged with lying to the F.B.I. about the entire thing. Without this one accusation, their entire fantastical impeachment house of cards fell apart. Not that it was all that solid to begin with, mind you.

The only question that remains, it seems, is how much longer they're going to drag their proceedings out before they admit defeat. They could try to impeach Biden anyway -- after all, they just successfully impeached the first sitting cabinet member in U.S. history for no particular reason. So attempting to impeach Biden for nothing at all has to still be seen as a possibility. But it's pretty clear that there are enough House Republicans who would simply not go along with this drastic measure, meaning they'll probably never have the votes for it on the floor.

The committee still has an interview with Hunter Biden scheduled, so they'll definitely keep going until that takes place. They'll rant and rave and accuse him of everything they can think up, but to no avail. Hopefully, this will be the final act of the impeachment circus.

We're nearing the end, it seems. And there won't be a bang. They searched high, they searched low, but it was all as meaningless as wind in dry grass. Because Joe Biden didn't do anything wrong. The impeachment circus will fold its tent and decamp, with naught to show for their efforts but a final whimper.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant