Sunday on MSNBC’s “KasieDC,” host Kasie Hunt asked Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) about the possibility of impeaching President Donald Trump and if there were any preparations underway for such an event.
Nadler dismissed that as a possibility and argued for impeachment proceedings to get underway, there would have to be bipartisan support.
“It’s way too early for that,” Nadler said. “We would have to see what the Mueller [investigation] comes up with and whether there’s good evidence from Mueller or from other sources of impeachable offenses before you would begin to consider that. There’s one other thing which I should make really clear — if you’re serious about impeaching a president, it cannot and should not be done on a partisan basis. You would have to have, at least by the end of the process, buy-in from the Republicans, or at least a good number of the Republicans, for two reasons: number one for the arithmetic, you can impeach a president on a majority vote, which means you need votes from the Republicans.”
“But secondly, more importantly, if you’re really serious about removing a president from office for high crimes and misdemeanors, you shouldn’t do that unless you get at least an appreciable fraction of the people who voted for him on the other side to agree, reluctantly perhaps, but to agree, ‘Yeah, you had to do it.’ Otherwise, you have 20 years of recriminations. ‘We won the election. You stole it from us.’ You don’t want to divide the country that way. If evidence arises that is of sufficient gravity to justify impeaching the president, and of sufficient persuasiveness to persuade people, at least by the end of the process, some of the people who voted on the other side, then you consider an impeachment, but not before.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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