Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, warned GOP colleagues in a closed-door meeting Tuesday against fanning the flames of impeachment for President Barack Obama, saying Democrats had successfully used the issue to raise $2 million online last weekend alone.
“Greg Walden got up and said that Democrats raised over $2 million this weekend by putting that out in the Internet. The White House is using it as a fund-raising tool. There’s no discussion among us. The only thing we said, and the Speaker reiterated this, is we’re not going there, we’re not interested in that, there’s no way that that would be successful, and talking about it only plays into the Democrats’ hands,” said Rep. John Fleming (R-LA).
According to a second source in the room, Walden discussed the subject of impeachment while specifically refraining from using the actual word “impeachment.”
“He deliberately didn’t use the ‘I’ word,” the source said.
At a conference meeting last week, Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) raised the topic of impeachment, saying that Obama is leaving the GOP few options given his aggressive executive overreach. But colleagues in the room “hissed” at him, according to a lawmaker present, because they didn’t want to address the subject.
Yoho hit back at critics Tuesday, saying, “People have their opinions, don’t they? If you had somebody that was repeatedly breaking the law and endangering somebody’s life, at what point would you not stand up and say something?”
Top White House aides, meanwhile, have been fanning the flames of impeachment over the past week while Democratic political organizations have been fundraising heavily off of it.
The impeachment talk largely entered the mainstream when former Alaska Gov. and presidential candidate Sarah Palin penned an op-ed for Breitbart News.
“His unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, ‘no mas,'” Palin wrote.
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