Democratic Rep. Al Green (Texas) vowed to bring a vote to impeach President Donald Trump to the floor of the House Wednesday, angering many of his fellow Democrats in the process.
Under House procedural rules, any member of the House may offer what is known as a “privileged motion" to force a vote on articles of impeachment.
The motion is almost certainly doomed to failure. GOP leadership, Politico reported, plans to respond by moving to table the motion. However, Green is determined to put his fellow Democrats on the record regarding their views about impeachment.
Green wrote a letter to his House colleagues Tuesday explaining his plans and the reasons behind them. In the letter, Green alleged that Trump has been guilty of inciting “hatred and hostility” against minorities in America, as well as the LGBT community.
In his letter, Green explicitly said that he favored impeaching Trump even in the absence that Trump has committed a crime, writing, “Impeachment is a political remedy, not a judicial remedy, thus it may be a high misdemeanor, which may or may not be a crime. … Friends, in the words of Malcolm Shabazz, ‘You’ve been had’ if you believe that a president has to perpetrate a crime to be impeached.”
Poorly. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has been aggressively attempting to quell actual votes on impeachment this year, believing that they will hurt Democrats at the ballot box in 2018.
Newsweek reports that three unnamed “prominent Democrats” were dispatched Tuesday to talk to Green in an attempt to force him to change his mind on the privileged motion, to no avail.
In the last month, several other Democrats, including Reps. Luis Guiterrez (Ill.) and Steve Cohen (Tenn.) have introduced articles of impeachment against Trump, but Democratic leadership has successfully kept those motions from a floor vote.
