Rep. Justin Amash Is The First Republican To Call For Donald Trump’s Impeachment


Getty Image

Donald Trump has, in so many ways, had it good. Since the release of the (still redacted) Mueller Report — which didn’t explicitly call for the president’s removal but did include many troubling and, possibly, criminal revelations — few Republicans have come after the president with the force of many Democrats, some of whom have called for impeachment.

Well, that ends now. On Saturday, Justin Amash, Republican Representative of Alaska, took to Twitter with a lengthy and impassioned tweet-storm in which he first accused Attorney General William Barr of misleading the public with his report on Mueller’s report and then, perhaps more importantly, claimed President Donald J. Trump “engaged in impeachable conduct.” He also said that partisanship “has eroded our system of checks and balances,” and alleged that few members of Congress had bothered to read the full (again, still redacted) report.

That was just the beginning. Amash went on, over the course of 13 tweets, to elaborate upon some of his charges. For instance, he alleged that Barr had “intended to mislead the public” about Mueller and his team’s findings, through the use of deceptive language.

Amash didn’t specify any examples of this, instead moving on to whether or not Trump’s actions detailed in the report qualify him for impeachment. He stated, for instance, that “undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.”

Amash also worried about what might happen if Trump was not brought up on impeachment charges.

“While impeachment should be undertaken only in extraordinary circumstances,” Amash wrote, “the risk we face in an environment of extreme partisanship is not that Congress will employ it as a remedy too often but rather that Congress will employ it so rarely that it cannot deter misconduct.”

Amash pointed out that some Republican colleagues have suffered an apparent flip-flop over things like character and lawfulness.

“We’ve witnessed members of Congress from both parties shift their views 180 degrees—on the importance of character, on the principles of obstruction of justice—depending on whether they’re discussing Bill Clinton or Donald Trump,” Amash wrote.

He concluded by calling the Constitution “brilliant and awesome,” and deserving of “a government to match it.”

Amash’s comments make him both the first Republican member of Congress to call for Trump’s impeachment but also a sharper critic of the president than many Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, who has voiced concern over beginning the impeachment process. According to CNN, the representative was elected into his position back in 2010, during the Tea Party wave of liberatarian-leaning conservatives. Still, Amash has found himself repeatedly pushing back against Trump and his supporters.

Amash’s tweet-storm earned him some raves from the other side of the aisle, some of whom wished more Democrats would up their game.

https://twitter.com/ava/status/1129867922342522881

×