A pair of House Democrats who opposed impeachment proceedings against President Trump say they’re following public opinion in their districts rather than party pressure. Rep. Peter King knows the feeling.
The New York Republican, 75, was among five GOP House members in 1998 who voted against impeaching President Bill Clinton on lying and obstruction of justice charges related to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. King said he was following the will of voters in his Long Island district. That’s the same explanation used by the only two Democrats to vote against impeachment hearings for Trump on Oct. 31, Reps. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Collin Peterson of Minnesota.
Both have felt strong pressure from the left for not pushing to evict Trump from office over charges he pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up political dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, a top-tier 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.
King said he did not face similar pressure from the right in late 1998, though the bulk of his colleagues voted for impeachment charges against Clinton.
“I can honestly say that nobody in the conference brought any pressure at all, because I’d gotten out in front on it early and it’s much easier. It’s actually easier, otherwise you get harassed, but I didn’t feel any,” King told the Washington Examiner. “The only pressure that I got was coming was from the local Republicans.”
King acknowledged, however, that the polarization with impeachment today is far different than what he saw in 1998.
“It’s nothing like we see now as far as mass demonstrations,” he said. “They were definitely, again, phone calls that were coming in.”
Early in the internet era, “so many were calls coming in through my district office in particular, that we had to communicate by cell phone, every line was taken continually,” King said.
Reflecting on the Clinton impeachment drama, which ended in the president’s acquittal by the Senate in February 1999, King said his Republican House prosecutors, known as managers, didn’t have a strong case for removing a sitting president.
“I just thought it was a terrible precedent. Republicans had gone that far with it,” King said. “And there was a feeling that this was scandalous and something had to be done, and they wanted impeachment. I would have supported censure but not impeachment.”
Now, despite weeks of closed-door depositions and public testimonies, public support for impeachment of Trump has dropped. And Democrats who were once sure of impeaching the president are having second thoughts.
“I have had a number of Democrats, not a lot, but a number of them, and I get the impression that they have been talking to others from Trump districts or districts that Trump carried, saying that they would prefer to go with censure rather than impeachment,” King said.
Michigan Democrat Rep. Brenda Lawrence told a radio host she thought censure might be a better solution as opposed to impeaching the president. Though a day later, Lawrence backed away from her original statement and claimed she supported impeaching the president.
