Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX) criticized his Democratic colleagues on Tuesday for showboating impeachment proceedings without actually intending to impeach President Donald Trump.
“Democrats don’t really want to impeach the president, they want to be under an impeachment process throughout the next election cycle,” Gooden told CNN host Chris Cuomo. “Democrats know that if they vote for impeachment, even if they are able to muster up the votes … when that goes to the Senate, the Senate will acquit the president. They know that.”
https://twitter.com/Lancegooden/status/1176709855777820673?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The Texas congressman explained that more than 30 Democrats in the House currently represent congressional districts that voted for Trump during the 2016 election cycle. The Democratic Party largely gained its House majority after a wave of the party’s moderate candidates were elected in those purple districts during the 2018 election cycle.
With the 2020 election on the horizon, many of the more moderate House Democrats have feared that voters’ distaste for impeachment could put the House majority back in the hands of the GOP. Accordingly, the party still does not seem to have the required 218 votes needed to impeach the president.
“Why waste all this time and these resources, why not get to work for the American people,” Gooden said. “All I heard from Democrats when we took office — I’m a freshman, all my freshman colleagues across the aisle said ‘Lance, I want to work with you, we want to get to work for the American people, we want to put all this partisanship behind’ but now we’re talking about impeaching the president, it’s outrageous.”
Gooden’s remarks come only a day after he introduced a resolution to strip House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler of his committee chairmanship over his “rogue witch-hunt” to impeach the president. The resolution stated that Nadler broke House rules by launching impeachment proceedings prior to the full House authorizing him to do so.
“If we’re going to actually move forward into this impeachment process, which it sounds like we’re going to get there if you talk to [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and the far-left caucus that’s driving the agenda — if we actually get to that point, we need someone to at least be fair. Chairman Nadler has not been,” Gooden told Cuomo. “He’s gone on his own and said ‘this is how we’re going to do it.’ That’s just not how the House rules say.”
The freshman lawmaker noted that Democrats’ focus on impeachment has prevented the House from enacting legislation that would benefit the American people. While the Democrat-led House has passed a host of bills, the legislation has been passed in partisan fashion without any input from across the aisle.
“Some of these bills, most all of them actually, are bills that Republicans wanted to work with Democrats on, but Democrats know that if we work across the aisle and actually have a bill that we’re all in unison on, then the president might actually sign it,” Gooden said. “God forbid the president signs something that the House passes because then we’d have to give the president a victory. Democrats won’t go for that.”
“The U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement [for example], they won’t even take it up because they know it’s bipartisan, because they know the votes are there and if it passes the House, it sails through the Senate and the president signs it,” he continued. “The president can declare victory and that’s something the Democrats won’t allow.”