A pair of Democratic former House members from California are hoping voters still care about President Trump’s second impeachment 22 months from now.
After losing reelection in 2020 following their first terms, ex-Reps. Harley Rouda and TJ Cox are blasting the Republicans who beat them over their vote against impeaching Trump for inciting crowds to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6. The House impeachment resolution passed Wednesday with the support of all Democrats and 10 Republicans and now goes to the Senate for trial in the coming weeks.
Rouda took a jab at his successor, GOP Rep. Michelle Steel, in the coastal Orange County district she now represents.
“At her first opportunity @MichelleSteelCA betrayed her country by siding with violent insurrectionists and Donald Trump. We knew she’d put her own political self interest before the people of Orange County. She always has. That’s why I am running to defeat her in 2022,” he tweeted.
Steel defended her vote against impeachment in a statement saying in a tweet:
The wounds caused by the act of terror we saw last week will not be healed by impeaching President Trump, which will only deepen the divide felt in our country today. Read my full statement on today’s impeachment vote: pic.twitter.com/fvulCoYLsr
— Rep. Michelle Steel (@RepSteel) January 13, 2021
Following his loss to Steel, previously an Orange County supervisor, Rouda promised in his concession he would track every vote his GOP opponent cast in Washington, suggesting he planned to run again in 2022.
The Cook Political Report rated California’s 48th Congressional District last cycle as “R+4” but also declared it as “Leans Democrat.”
Steel defeated Rouda by a slim margin, leaving the freshman Republican in a similar circumstance that Rouda found himself in at the beginning of his first term in 2019.
Cox, meanwhile, is taking a similar approach as he eyes a comeback against Republican Rep. David Valadao, to whom he lost by a slim margin. Cox took his own jab at the GOP in general, as his former opponent, Valadao, was one of 10 Republicans to have voted for impeaching the president.
“All these Republican bootlickers who are saying, ‘We shouldn’t impeach because, ‘it’s time to heal’ and move forward’ don’t care about any of that. They’re just trying to avoid a vote to hold themselves and Donald Trump accountable,” he tweeted Wednesday.
Cox took it one step further, writing in an op-ed in the Fresno Bee that Republicans in Congress were just as much at fault for the violence at the Capitol last week as Trump.
“Some legislators are now trying to disavow this week’s violence in carefully parsed tweets. But these bootlickers have done far more damage to our Constitution and our country than the mob who trashed the Capitol,” the California Democrat wrote.
