I spent this beautiful Saturday coaching soccer and then watching my son’s baseball team pull off a 7-5 comeback win. So, I didn’t immediately see that someone had thrown a lit bomb into the Twitter universe.
Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), a critic of President Trump who has entertained a run against him in 2020, became the first Republican congressman to say the president “engaged in impeachable conduct” based on the Mueller Report.
The Michigan lawmaker, often the lone Trump dissenter on his side of the House aisle, shared his conclusions in a lengthy Twitter thread Saturday after reviewing the full report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
Amash wrote that after reading the 448-page report, he’d concluded that not only did Mueller’s team show Trump attempting to obstruct justice, but that Attorney General William P. Barr had “deliberately misrepresented” the findings and that few members of Congress had even read it.
“Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment,” Amash wrote.
Rep. Amash has always been an outlier in the Republican caucus, known more his libertarianism than any GOP orthodoxy. Moreover, the Democrats don’t actually need any Republican votes in the House in order to impeach Trump. They just need to decide to have an investigation and a majority of the votes will be there.
Still, having even a single Republican lawmaker say not just that Trump should be investigated but that there is already enough information contained in the redacted Mueller Report to justify his conviction and removal is extremely beneficial.
It helps undercut the idea that this is a partisan conclusion. It gives cover to any nervous Democrats. It begins a process that could conceivably lead some Republican senators to the same conclusion.
It’s a small step, but it’s one of the steps we needed to traverse if we’re ever going to get to the destination.
