Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s non-voting House member, said Monday that while she believes Trump committed impeachable offenses, she said the best way to impeach is to “throw the idiot out at the next election.”
Ms. Norton said in April that pursuing an impeachment inquiry was a “road to nowhere” that would ultimately hurt Democrats.
The D.C. Democrat said that based on the Mueller report “[Mr.] Trump has committed impeachable offenses,” but said she didn’t support an inquiry because “you would hear nothing else from the House.”
“We’re just six months into winning the House, that’s the last you would have heard of us, is impeachment,” she said while attending an LGBTQ town hall in D.C. “The House indicts, the Senate confirms. The Senate is controlled by Republicans. So until 2020, all we can show if we impeach is if we indict him.”
“Everybody will understand that the Senate didn’t impeach, but everyone would say ’Eleanor, what will you have done for us anyway?’ So the house is reluctant to impeach, not because he does not deserve impeachment … but because we have to ask whether we are willing to sacrifice everything else for impeachment for which cannot be rendered,” Ms. Norton said.
“The Constitution made it hard to impeach. Why did the Constitution say ’you need two-thirds of the Senate to impeach’? I will tell you why: In a democracy, listen to me, people far wiser than I were saying to you, ’the best way to impeach is to throw the idiots out at the next election,’” she said.
During the town hall, Ms. Norton also addressed Mitch McConnell saying the pursuit of D.C. statehood was an example of “full-bore socialism”
“We’re going to get D.C. statehood not from a socialist House of Representatives, but the House of Representatives,” she said.
She added that the most frustrating part of representing Washington is that Americans “think we have the same rights.”
“They can’t imagine that the Capitol of the United States, unlike any capital in the world, would deprive its residents of the same rights that everyone else has. It’s an anomaly. I don’t think the framers meant this, but the only way to correct it is for you and me to do it,” she said, promising that D.C. would “storm the Congress” on July 24th, when the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing will hold the first hearing on a bill that would admit D.C. as the 51st state.
Due to being a delegate and not a full representative, Ms. Norton wouldn’t be able to vote on impeachment if it were pursued or D.C. statehood.
• Bailey Vogt can be reached at bvogt@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.