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Democrats renew impeachment inquiry calls after Trump’s racist tweets

Reps. Al Green, Madeleine Dean among House Democrats who resumed impeachment chatter on Monday

Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, resumed his call to impeach President Donald Trump on Monday. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo)
Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, resumed his call to impeach President Donald Trump on Monday. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo)

Rep. Al Green has promised to force a vote “this month” on impeaching President Donald Trump after the president fired off a series of tweets on Sunday, widely condemned as racist, in which he told four minority Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to the countries of their ancestry before trying to fix America’s problems.

Other House Democrats renewed their pleas to party leadership Monday to open a Judiciary Committee impeachment inquiry into Trump.

“[Trump’s] racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and Islamophobia can no longer be tolerated or ignored. We must impeach,” Green, a Texas Democrat, tweeted Monday.

[Trump says he doesn’t want to be impeached, but he sure acts like it]

Trump did not apologize. He doubled down on Monday for his comments that condemned Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts. He falsely claimed they all “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.”

Only Omar, a naturalized American citizen from Somalia, was born outside the United States.

Since March, Green has promised to force a House floor vote on impeaching the president — which he did twice, unsuccessfully, when Republicans controlled the chamber in 2017 and 2018 — but until Monday he had been coy about when he would pull the trigger on a repeat of the maneuver.

[Where all 24 House Judiciary Democrats stand on impeachment]

A member of the House at any time can file articles of impeachment against the president as a privileged resolution, which triggers a two-day time clock in which the House has to consider the matter.

“He is unfit for public office, and if he displayed any of these behaviors in most private companies, he would be summarily terminated with haste,” Green said in a statement Monday.

“I will again this month bring impeachment to a vote on the Floor of the U.S. House of Representatives for bigotry in policy, harmful to our society,” Green said.

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Green is one of at least 87 Democrats who support opening an impeachment inquiry into Trump, a move that Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes on political grounds to provide cover for moderate Democrats who hail from swing districts.

Most Democrats, 147, either don’t yet support opening an impeachment inquiry or haven’t elaborated on their where they stand on the matter, according to a Roll Call analysis.

Rep. Madeleine Dean, a Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee that would perform an impeachment inquiry into Trump, resumed her calls to commence the process on Monday.

“This is not something I take lightly — but the gravity of the moment demands it,” Dean wrote in a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed, alleging that the president has “called upon his entire administration to break the law and ignore Congressional subpoenas — not just on Russia, but in every area of Congressional oversight.”

Dean is one of 13 Democrats on the Judiciary Committee that supports opening up a formal impeachment probe. The remaining 10 Democrats on the panel either don’t support a formal probe or have positions that remain unclear. Every Republican on the committee opposes launching an inquiry against the president.

Former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is expected to appear before the committee for three hours on July 24. He has agreed to answer questions about his 22-month investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia and whether Trump obstructed the special counsel’s probe.

Mueller has said he will not comment on anything outside the bounds of the final report he issued to the Justice Department earlier this year. A redacted copy of that report was made public in April.

Democrats have been holding public hearings on the contents of Mueller’s report under the assumption that many Americans have not had the time to read it and digest what it says about the actions of Trump and his associates before and during his presidency.

“There’s so much within the four corners of that document that the American people do not yet know that I’ll be delighted if he can help us bring to life,” Dean said Monday in an interview on MSNBC, speaking aboutMueller’s upcoming testimony before the Judiciary panel.

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