Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York urged moderate Democrats to speak out against ongoing impeachment inquiries against President Donald Trump because they “were not elected to impeach the president of the United States.”
Zeldin appeared on SirusXM Patriot’s “Breitbart News Daily” on Tuesday to discuss his opposition to the ongoing impeachment inquiry into the president. Breitbart News editor-in-chief and program host Alex Marlow told Zeldin that his “cynical” take on the impeachment hearings on Capitol Hill was that they were designed to derail the president’s agenda before the 2020 elections.
“The agenda when the president got elected was not to dodge impeachments,” Marlow said. “The agenda was to, I don’t know, get a new trade deal passed, to get our border secured, to take on China. All this stuff that is pushed out of the front page and replaced by this crap, for lack of a better expression.”
“Well, first off, I think your take is very important and accurate, and it’s an assessment analyzing where all the chips have fallen onto the field, understanding that there are some members of Congress who are calling for the president’s impeachment since the day he got elected,” Zeldin replied.
“For many members of Congress who are supporting this, they don’t care what the charges are, what the facts are, what the evidence is—they’re just looking for an excuse to negate the 2016 election and to win in 2020,” Zeldin added.
Zeldin argued that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic members of the House had come to realize “that this was so politically insane” and that the impeachment hearings were actually putting Democratic Party’s majority in the House in peril. Zeldin theorized that the moderate Democrats elected in 2018, which contribute to the Democrats’ current House majority, “were not elected to impeach the president of the United States.”
“The right thing for [moderate Democrats] to do as they come back to D.C. [Tuesday] is to speak to Nancy Pelosi and say, ‘Listen, this is so far off the rails. This is political suicide. I’m not going to.’ They need to tell the speaker that they’re not going to get re-elected because of it and that Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to be the speaker anymore because of it, because the Democrats will be back in the minority,” Zeldin said.
Although some moderate Democrats were initially hesitant to fully support calls for impeachment, Vox reported that several first-term Democrats in close districts eventually came out in support of the House’s impeachment inquiry after more details about Trump’s request that the Ukrainian government investigate one of his political opponents became public. And although many voters are still divided along party lines, polling during the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings showed steadily growing support to impeach Trump, according to Reuters.
