During Friday’s White House press briefing, press secretary Josh Earnest alleged that some Republicans are running for office in order to impeach President Obama.
Responding to a question posed by CNN’s Jon Acosta about White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer’s statement that the possibility of impeachment shouldn’t be discounted, Earnest said that “senior members” and “prominent voices in the Republican party” are certainly calling for impeachment.
“There have been a lot of fundraising announcements within the Democratic party with the word impeachment in it,” Acosta countered. “This sounds like a fundraising ploy, a political ploy, not a real thing. You don’t really think the president is going to be impeached, do you?”
Earnest ignored Acosta’s question about the Democratic party and instead continued to call out Republicans for running for office in the midterm elections with the goal of impeaching Obama.
“I think that there are some Republicans, including some Republicans who are running for office, hoping that they can get into office so that they can impeach the president,” asserted Earnest. “That is apparently a view that they hold because that’s one they have repeatedly expressed publicly.”
Earnest continued to predictably attack House Republicans for their inaction in Congress despite the fact that the heat has lately been on Harry Reid and his Senate for congressional gridlock.
“We also have not seen action from House Republicans on the VA reforms that we spent a lot of the summer talking about,” the press secretary said. “We saw a lot of congressional Republicans racing to be interviewed by television reporters asking them about the importance of reforms to our veterans administration system.”
“Here we are, one week before Congress is about to leave town, and there’s no discernible path that Congress is going to make progress on,” Earnest continued. “Instead, we see House Republicans giddy about the prospect of passing legislation along party-line vote to pursue a taxpayer-funded lawsuit against the President of the United States merely for doing his job.”
Ironically, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told NBC’s David Gregory on “Meet the Press” Sunday that House Republicans have proposed a “very specific solution” to fix the Veterans Affairs issue and are simply waiting on the Senate to move forward.
Watch the footage from Friday’s press briefing below, via Real Clear Politics.
