This Biden campaign may have thought that the 2020 presidential campaign was going to be fought over Wuhan virus with a barely coherent and spittle-dribbling Joe Biden, hidden away in an undisclosed location, getting lost on his teleprompter and taking part in such hardball performaces as a Yahoo Townhall and making breathtakingly stupid statements about the Trump administration’s response to the media-created crisis (for instance, nearly two weeks after the Trump administration began delivering fresh food that would be destroyed to food banks, Biden criticized the Trump administration for not delivering food to food banks). Many political observers noted that the more Joe Biden stays out of sight, the higher his approval rating goes.

With a supine Bush-esque administration and a total reliance on mainstream media, this plan might have worked. The slow-burning Chernobyl of Hunter Biden and Ukrainian energy company Burisma and the pay-to-play scheme engineered by Joe Biden that was under the microscope about the time of President Trump’s laughable impeachment had all but faded away. The media were pushing hard to economically devastate the US to help Biden win in November. But today there is a vigorous media that is not beholden to Qatar or billionaire progressive investors to carry stories the somnolent traditional media won’t touch and the Trump administration is anything but low key when it comes to pushing back on media narratives and grabbing control of news cycles.

But now Ukraine and Burisma and Hunter Biden have come roaring back with a vengeance, much like the Biblical parable of the expelled demon (Matthew 12:43-45).

Yesterday, a Ukrainian member of parliament released audio tapes of Ukrainian politicians speaking of efforts by Biden to protect his son from scrutiny. Admittedly, the provenance on these tapes is shaky but, as the Democrats said when kicking off the October Surprise investigation that helped cost George H. W. Bush the White House, it isn’t the weight of the evidence but the seriousness of the allegation which demands an investigation.

[READ Team Biden Panics As Leaked Ukraine Phone Calls May Require Appointment of a Special Counsel.]

Today, the Senate sprang into action, like a fierce rabbit.*

A Senate committee voted on Wednesday to authorize a subpoena as part of a Republican-led investigation targeting former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

The party-line vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee came amid vigorous objections from Democrats, who have accused their GOP counterparts of aiding Russian disinformation efforts and improperly using the Senate’s resources to boost President Donald Trump’s political fortunes.

Wednesday’s vote authorizes the committee’s chairman, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), to subpoena Blue Star Strategies, a Democratic public-relations firm that did consulting work for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company whose board Hunter Biden sat on. Johnson’s probe focuses on allegations that Blue Star Strategies sought to leverage Biden’s position on the board in order to influence matters at the Obama-era State Department.

“The question I would ask is, what is everybody worried about?” Johnson said. “If there’s nothing there, we’ll find out there’s nothing there. But if there’s something there, the American people need to know that.”

The Democrats are crying foul, but, as we learned during the Mueller investigation, anyone who is innocent has nothing to fear from a proctological exam by hostile investigators and, in fact, cooperate in the fullest as a way to prove their innocence and clear their name. I’m sure Joe and his baby-daddy kid will see it the same way.

All snark aside, of course this investigation is driven by politics. That doesn’t make it improper or unethical, it is simply a fact that nothing is known today about Hunter Biden and Burisma that wasn’t known six months ago. What has happened though is that the failed coup Nancy Pelosi tried to engineer using one of the dimmest bulbs in the House, that would be Fat Jerry Nadler, and the equally dim but monstrously unethical Adam “Pencil Neck” Schiff has destroyed much of the institutional comity that had existed. They, by their willingness to attempt to remove a President by impeachment during an election year, demonstrated their willingness to harness the entire power of the House to carry out a cheap and laughable hit. This makes Joe Biden a combatant in this war and a completely legal target. The investigation is also driven by the fact that Mitch McConnell needs Trump an helluva lot more than Trump needs him. McConnell’s majority is slim and virtually everywhere Trump is much more popular with Republicans than is their senator. If they want to harness the Trump GOTV effort and benefit from the Trump fundraising machine, they need to be seen as moving in step with the President.

What will this investigation produce? Headlines. Headlines that will be prominent as the nation puts Wuhan behind it and begins to seriously focus on November. The hearings produced by these subpoenas will damage Biden. Hunter Biden, impulse-driven and drug-addled, will either refuse to testify or he will create comedy gold.

All in all, it says the Trump campaign has no intention of ceding the terms of the election to Biden. Biden and the Democrats may not like what is about to happen but, unlike even 10 years ago, they are in no position to shut it down.

*’fierce rabbit’ is how Patton described Montgomery in one of the many jokes he told about Montgomery.