While congressional Democrats are chomping at the bit to see President Donald Trump removed from office, none of them are willing to endorse impeachment proceedings before Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is completed.
Nobody, that is, except ultra-radical Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), who became the first members of Congress to sign on to a “Pledge to Impeach” Trump this week.
Impeachment or bust!
“It’s my pleasure to support this pledge to impeach Donald Trump,” Tlaib remarked in a statement. “I can’t wait for us to show people, especially families in my district, that they are being put first—and that we’re going to hold everyone accountable to the law, including the president of the United States.”
Omar and Tlaib, the first Muslim women elected to Congress, responded to pressure from the grassroots advocacy group “By the People” to sign the impeachment oath. ABC News producer Ben Siegel was among the first reporters to reveal the pair’s pledge on Tuesday morning.
Inbox: @RepRashida and @IlhanMN are first members of Congress to sign on to @by_the_ppl pledge to impeach President Trump: https://t.co/2RYQMCAplM
— Ben Siegel (@benyc) February 26, 2019
Time to go back to law school
By the People is a project of Americans for All of Us Action, a social welfare organization and nonprofit, which has the single goal of removing President Trump from office. “Just as our ancestors united to defeat kings, the Confederacy, fascism, and Jim Crow, we will unite to defeat the Trump Administration,” the group promised.
Curiously, By the People don’t exactly say what Trump did that is worthy of impeachment. “We are not lawyers,” the organization explains on its FAQ page in answer to the question, “What is the constitutional case for impeachment?”
Rep. Tlaib, however, is a lawyer, and she ought to know enough about due process to understand that calling for impeachment without any evidence of wrongdoing is troublesome. Shortly after being sworn into office in January, Tlaib promised, “[W]e’re going to impeach the motherf***er.”
This profanity-laced pledge, so soon after Tlaib took office, should disturb Americans who value their personal freedoms and constitutional protections. While the special counsel has yet to publish its conclusions on the Russia investigation, the House and Senate each conducted their own independent investigations and found no evidence incriminating Trump of collusion or any other crime.
These are the same political bodies responsible for investigating Trump in the case of impeachment proceedings. But these facts are inconsequential to groups like By the People, who want to see Trump hang regardless of the evidence.
“Millions of Americans agree that Donald Trump isn’t fit to be president. This is not an issue of Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s about checking the flagrant abuse of presidential power from a white supremacist who is profiting off of the presidential office, abusing his powers and undermining our democracy and our Constitution,” said By the People spokeswoman Alexandra Flores-Quilty.
Come hell or high water
While she was running for election in Minnesota, Omar seemed willing to wait to see what Mueller’s report concluded before calling for Trump’s head. “If [special counsel Robert Mueller’s] report comes out and we keep having the breaking headlines every single day, I’m pretty sure that [impeachment] is going to call for itself,” Omar told CNN’s New Day co-anchor John Berman.
At the time, Omar was simply repeating the party line and bowing to party leadership by urging restraint. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) verbalized the Democrats’ official position last month in a Today show interview. “We shouldn’t be impeaching for a political reason, and we shouldn’t avoid impeachment for a political reason. So we’ll just have to see how it comes,” she said.
Omar has reversed course since she was safely elected, however, as evidenced by her signature on a document which most Democrats are unwilling to sign. Although mainstream liberals are currently reluctant to join Tlaib and Omar in signing the impeachment pledge, expect them to initiate proceedings as soon as it is politically expedient to do so.
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