Barn door, officially closed. The colt bolted on July 21, when Joe Biden's withdrawal from the presidential election took all of the steam out of an impeachment bid that had already lost most of it over the past year. 

The combined report from three House committees accused Biden of aiding the corrupt activities of Hunter Biden and other family members as Vice President. It didn't add much new evidence to the claims that the committees hadn't already released during their investigations:

The House's three-committee impeachment inquiry released a report Monday morning finding President Joe Biden has "engaged in impeachable conduct," including an "abuse of power" when he was vice president and "obstruction of justice" as president to cover his family's "global influence peddling racket" to defraud the United States.

"The totality of the corrupt conduct uncovered by the committees is egregious," says the executive summary of the 292-page impeachment report released by the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means committees. "President Joe Biden conspired to commit influence peddling and grift. In doing so, he abused his office and, by repeatedly lying about his abuse of office, has defrauded the United States to enrich his family."

The executive summary lays out the case in broad terms:

First and foremost, overwhelming evidence demonstrates that President Biden participated in a conspiracy to monetize his office of public trust to enrich his family. Among other aspects of this conspiracy, the Biden family and their business associates received tens of millions of dollars from foreign interests by leading those interests to believe that such payments would provide them access to and influence with President Biden. As Vice President, President Biden actively participated in this conspiracy by, among other things, attending dinners with his family’s foreign business partners and speaking to them by phone, often when being placed on speakerphone by Hunter Biden. For example, in 2014, Vice President Biden attended a dinner for Hunter Biden with Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina. Following the dinner, Baturina wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, a firm associated with Hunter Biden. Then, months later, as Hunter Biden and his business associates continued to solicit more money from Baturina, Vice President Biden participated in a phone call with Baturina and Hunter Biden where Vice President Biden told Baturina, “you be good to my boy.” Moreover, President Biden knowingly participated in this conspiracy. Based on the totality of the evidence, it is inconceivable that President Biden did not understand that he was taking part in an effort to enrich his family by abusing his office of public trust. 

The evidence also establishes that the Biden family went to great lengths to conceal this conspiracy. Foreign money was transmitted to the Biden family through complicated financial transactions. The Biden family laundered funds through intermediate entities and broke up large transactions into numerous smaller transactions. Substantial efforts were also made to hide President Biden’s involvement in his family’s business activities.

The committees could not establish a clear and explicit quid pro quo necessary for a criminal case of corruption. However, they do argue that the level of evidence meets the test set by Democrats when impeaching Donald Trump the first time:

President Biden’s participation in this conspiracy to enrich his family constitutes impeachable conduct. By monetizing the Vice Presidency for his family’s benefit, he abused his office of public trust, placing the welfare of his family ahead of the welfare of the United States. He also put foreign interests ahead of the interests of the American people. Indeed, precedent set by House Democrats in 2019 in their impeachment of President Donald J. Trump establishes that “abuse of office,” defined as the exercise of “official power to obtain an improper personal benefit, while ignoring or injuring the national interest,” is an impeachable offense.

That basically argues the political definition of impeachable conduct rather than the constitutional definition. The political definition of impeachable conduct is "whatever the House majority agrees is impeachable." This conduct certainly seems less defensible than Trump's attempt to get dirt on Hunter Biden in his phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, which may have been unseemly but hardly qualified constitutionally as impeachable conduct. Using the office to enrich one's family businesses is closer to the intent of the impeachment clause.

However, we won't ever get an opportunity to find out whether the current House majority defines Biden's conduct as impeachable. The impeachment effort was already pointless, given the Democrat majority in the Senate; at best, it would have been an attempt to even the playing field by putting the same congressional blot on Biden's record that Trump got. Biden's shock retirement from the election made it even more pointless, however, as his career will come to a close regardless of any action by Congress to impeach him.

The report also accuses the current Biden White House of interfering with their probe, as well as with the investigations into Hunter Biden:

The report also accused the White House and others in the Biden administration of hampering Congress’ efforts to obtain key documents and witnesses related to probes of the president’s handling of classified materials and his son’s business dealings.

In the aftermath of the February release of the report on Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, the committees sought an audio recording of the two-day interview Biden sat for with Hur in October. Hur’s report did not lead to charges against Biden, but it contained politically and personally damaging judgments about the president’s age and mental fitness. ...

The committee said both the FBI and IRS investigations into Hunter Biden were hampered by red tape or required additional layers of approval and oversight before parts of the investigation could proceed — a result that the committee said was due to his father’s then-position as a former vice president, and a likely future candidate for the top of the ticket. The tax investigation into Hunter Biden began in 2018, before Biden announced his 2020 candidacy. The FBI, with the assistance of the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, opened a separate probe into his business dealings in 2019.

And yet, the committees make no formal recommendation for articles of impeachment on the floor of the House. That tacitly recognizes what is clearly obvious now, which is that there's no real point to pursuing impeachment. Biden's political career is over, and there's no way Hunter or any of the other Bidens will enter into politics now. In that sense, it parallels the Trump impeachments, which were designed to ensure that Trump couldn't win another election -- which may be in the process of failing, even with Biden out of the race. If Biden's not running again, what's the point of impeachment?

Indeed, that may be the real question of the last 30 years. Impeachment has turned into a political weapon rather than a check on abuse of power. Perhaps Congress needs to ask itself what the point of impeachment really is, constitutionally rather than politically, and recalculate its own actions in light of a new definition.