The City Council in Richmond, California, unanimously passed a resolution Tuesday calling for Congress to consider impeaching President Trump.
Though largely symbolic, passage of the resolution means the Bay Area city will formally recommend that federal lawmakers in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee investigate Mr. Trump with respect to whether the president’s international business ties run afoul of the “Emoluments Clause,” a Constitution provision that prohibits members of the U.S. government from profiting off of foreign states.
In adopting the resolution this week, Richmond reportedly became the first city in the United States to formally advocate for the president’s impeachment, according to KGO, a local ABC affiliate.
“Unfortunately with this president it’s oddly appropriate,” Richmond City Council member Jael Myrick said Tuesday, the station reported.
The resolution calling for Congress to consider Mr. Trump’s impeachment was proposed by Council member Gayle McLauchlin, Richmond’s former two-term mayor and a member of the Green Party.
“This is our voice,” she said Tuesday, KGO reported. “This is our country. We have a right to speak up.”
Mr. Trump’s vast business holdings have been a point of contention for the president’s critics since before he took office last month. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a political watchdog group, sued Mr. Trump three days after his inauguration for alleged violations of the Emoluments Clause, and asked a federal judge to force the president to stop taking payments from foreign governments.
“President Trump has made his slogan ’America First,’” CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said when the suit was filed last month. “So you would think he would want to strictly follow the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, since it was written to ensure our government officials are thinking of Americans first, and not foreign governments.”
Richmond’s City Council is served by seven representatives including Mayor Tom Butt, a Democrat who recently compared Mr. Trump’s position on climate change to ideas espoused during “the dark ages.”
“I was reminded that the times we are going through with Trump are not unlike the Dark Ages, when reclusive monks in remote monasteries copied and preserved ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts until they could be rediscovered in the Renaissance,” Mr. Butt wrote in an open letter last month.
“Every day, the Trump administration becomes more incredibly unbelievable,” he wrote.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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