Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, wants to impeach President Trump. Badly. And sometimes ludicrously.
The Texas Democrat wants it so eagerly, in fact, that he often uses whatever is happening in the news cycle at the moment to argue that the time to impeach Trump is now. It doesn’t matter what’s happening: Rep. Green will find a way to tie it back to his obsession with impeaching the current president. This single-minded pursuit of impeachment has, of course, produced some notably absurd moments for the congressman, including when he claimed this week that the chaos in Virginia is further proof that Trump must be impeached.
You read that right: Three Democrats in Virginia get in trouble, so that means the Republican president should leave office.
The fact that Virginia’s Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, and its Democratic attorney general, Mark Herring, have not yet resigned despite admitting to wearing blackface when they were younger “is but a symptom of a greater syndrome that currently plagues our country as a result of not acting on President Trump’s bigotry,” Green argued this week.
We’ve done it, folks. We’ve reached the part of the #resistance argument where Trump is responsible for even the sins of Democrats.
Green argued that Northam and Herring have been emboldened to stare down their scandals “to a great extent because the Trump presidency has sent a message that you can be immune to the consequences of bigotry, by daring those with the authority and power to constitutionally remove you from office.”
“We no longer stare bigotry down; bigotry now stares us down,” the congressman added. “Further, an argument that Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring should resign will subject us to accusations of political hypocrisy if we refuse to take on a bigoted president.”
In December 2017, Green forced a floor vote on articles of impeachment. The measure was supported by a whole 58 Democrats. In January 2018, he forced another impeachment floor vote. He got the support of 66 Democrats that time. It’s unclear when he plans to go for an impeachment hat trick in this current session of Congress.
Some Virginia Democrats, most notably the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, have begged Northam to resign. They’re not wrong to ask for it. In fact, I argued a little while back that the way in which Northam has handled this scandal is reason enough for him to resign. Forget the old, stupid photos of him in blackface and/or Ku Klux Klan regalia for a moment. The fact that he first apologized, then retracted his apology and denied involvement in the photo, and then held a press conference where he admitted to wearing blackface at a totally different event in the mid-1980s, shows the man is both staggeringly incompetent and conceited. He shouldn’t be trusted with a book of matches, let alone the governor’s mansion.
But for Green, Northam resigning is not enough. Trump must be impeached!
“The remedy must be more than talking points about a much-needed conversation concerning bigotry,” he said in arguing to impeach Trump. “We cannot allow bigotry to go unchecked.”
I’ll give this to Rep. Green: The man’s messaging is remarkably consistent, even if it’s idiotic.
