Democrats are pushing ‘made-up crime,’ Tom McClintock says as impeachment nears
Tom McClintock has a warning for Democrats: Stop engaging in an “abuse of impeachment” that relies on “made up crime.”
The House plans to vote Wednesday on two articles of impeachment, the first time since 1998 the House has taken such votes and only the third time in American history. Crafted entirely by Democrats, they charge President Donald Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
The vote is expected to fall almost entirely along party lines, with Republicans unified against both articles. Democrats control 233 House seats and Republicans have 197.
No Republicans are expected to vote for either article. GOP members wanted more debate Wednesday, but were turned down. As a result, said Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, top Judiciary Committee Republican, “Democrats have done grave and, I fear, irreparable, damage to this institution.”
McClintock, California’s only Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee, whose Democrats wrote the articles of impeachment, has had much the same thought. He’s been adamant since the impeachment process began that Trump has done nothing remotely close to triggering an impeachment inquiry.
And he’s been sharply critical of Democrats, saying they haven’t given Republicans a chance to have their views heard.
Democrats countered Tuesday that the GOP has taken the view that Trump has done nothing impeachable, and will not be budged.
“It seems the only Republican members willing to admit the president did something wrong have either already retired or announced plans they intend to retire at the end of this Congress,” said House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat.
“I get it – it’s hard to criticize a president of your own party. But that shouldn’t matter here,” he said..
McClintock insisted his views are not simply blind loyalty to the president. In an interview with McClatchy Tuesday, he compared the breakdown of bipartisan cooperation to 1860, when southern Democrats’ anger at President Abraham Lincoln over slavery triggered secession and the Civil War.
“I’m not predicting anything like that in our future,” the congressman said. But he warned that the impeachment drama has triggered “a breakdown of the institutions of our government...it breaks down the civility and the willingness to compromise.”
And while he won’t predict the November elections, he said impeachment “has certainly engaged Republicans in a manner I haven’t seen since the Tea Party movement.”
That grassroots movement, which featured conservatives angry at Obamacare and rising government spending, helped the GOP take control of the House from Democrats in 2010.
McClintock has been unwavering in his criticisms of effort to impeach Trump, and Tuesday renewed his warning that the process is throwing democracy into chaos.
Ahead, he said, is a loss of civility in public discourse and “respect for the rule of law.”
This is also a time when both parties are coming together around some of the day’s biggest issues. Before the week ends, Congress is expected to pass a sweeping plan for funding the government during this fiscal year as well as a comprehensive defense policy bill. And the House is likely to approve a new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.
“Look back at the fact that those matters have been pending for the past year,” McClintock said. “They were all brought to the floor in a single week to address criticisms” that Congress was not doing meaningful work.
Democrats Wednesday plan to say the president used his office to help his political prospects when he asked Ukraine to look into Vice President Joe Biden and his son. Trump delayed security aid to Ukraine while doing so.
McClintock called the first article on impeachment, alleging Trump abused his power, “the made-up crime.”
After all, McClintock contended, “he violated no law. He exercised authority clearly granted him by the Constitss,by trying to assure no corruption was involved.
If anything, McClintock said, Democrats are practicing an “abuse of impeachment the American founders feared, that the power to overrule a national election would devolve into a weapon of partisan warfare.”
The second article, involving obstruction of Congress is “another made-up crime,” McClintock said.
The White House’s reluctance to cooperate with the investigation came because Trump “sought to defend in court his constitutional right to maintain the confidentiality of policy discussions, the confidentiality that this Congress enjoys.”
Trump’s opponents are placing the “worst possible interpretation of the president’s motives” in this process, he said.
Nothing new about that, McClintock said. That’s politics.
“If this can become the new standard of impeachment that Congress can impeach any president whose motives his opponents question...well then no president can make any decision without subjecting the nation to the travesty going on today,” he said.
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