Investigating the President Blog
Post #3 Thus He Speaks, Thus They Act
by Rudy Ralph Martinez, July 16, 2019
On Sunday, July 14th, president Donald J. Trump launched racist barbs via Twitter against four congresswomen of color, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Ilhan Omar (D-MN). His comments against the group of progressives known as “The Squad” included a demand to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.” All four women are American citizens, with Omar having left Somalia for the United States at the age of 12. Ocasio-Cortez, born in New York, hails from a Puerto Rican family, Tlaib, born in Detroit, is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, and Pressley was born in Cincinnati.
Trump’s ill-formed remarks are another display of his inherently xenophobic and disdainful character, nearly paralleling his remarks about “shithole countries” from 2017. Just two days after his remarks, the House of Representatives voted 240 to 187 to condemn Trump’s remarks as racist. Surprisingly, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has been critical of these women in the past and proven to be a seemingly insurmountable roadblock to impeachment, denounced the comments as racist. Unsurprisingly, the vote was nearly-partisan.
Beyond drawing a strong rebuke from “The Squad” and nearly every Democratic lawmaker on Capitol Hill, chants of impeachment are once again echoing through Washington D.C. Tlaib responded to the president, Tweeting “…His dangerous ideology is the crisis. He needs to be impeached.”
Before the vote condemning Trump’s remarks, Rep. Al Green (D-TX) voiced his intention to bring forth a vote on impeachment before the House’s five-week recess in August. Just hours after the vote, Green filed articles of impeachment against president Trump. Green’s reasoning lies within the basis that Trump continues to prove his incompetence to hold office, with his bigotry being “harmful to society.”
Green read from his resolution before the House floor Tuesday night, claiming that “Donald John Trump has…brought the high office of the President of the United States in contempt, ridicule, disgrace, and disrepute…”
There are those who fear that Green’s push for impeachment, while well-intentioned and completely within his rights, will muddy current and future efforts to have Trump removed from office.
As we go to press it turns out the Green’s impeachment resolution was voted down by the House in a 332 to 95 vote. Those opposed consisted of Republicans and Democrat moderates including Speaker Pelosi.
My question is: Why now?
This all comes as Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s testimony looms large. Mueller is set to testify before a House Judiciary and Intelligence Committee on July 24th. In my opinion, Mueller’s testimony remains an event-horizon, a spectacle of such magnitude that it is nearly impossible to predict what comes after it. There is the possibility Mueller’s testimony becomes one of the watershed political moments of the twenty-first century or is simply a reiteration of Mueller’s heavily redacted report. Rep. Cedric Richardson told The Washington Post that he doesn’t “think that impeachment is going to happen before Mueller testifies, before we gain more evidence…”
Green has done this before, most famously in 2017, when he responded to Trump’s aforementioned “shithole countries” remark with an impeachment vote backed by a mere 58 democrats. While the support he gathers this time around as stronger, Richardson’s comments are evidence democrats will want to wait until after Mueller’s testimony to make up their minds.
Whether through the efforts of Green, the words of Mueller, or the actions of the American people, Trump’s tyranny has to end. Only time will tell what means will prove to be most viable.