Tom McClintock asks Biden, Pelosi to halt impeachment after voting to uphold election
Rep. Tom McClintock, one of two California Republicans to vote against last week’s GOP effort to overturn the election, has joined six other like-minded colleagues to urge a stop to any impeachment proceedings.
“This impeachment would undermine your priority of unifying Americans,” says a letter to President-elect Joe Biden.
It asks Biden, who will be sworn into office January 20, to urge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., not to proceed “in the spirit of healing and fidelity to our Constitution.”
McClintock has questioned the presidential election results. He was one of 126 Republicans who last year backed an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit seeking to overturn election results, supporting President Donald Trump’s efforts to contest swing states he lost to Biden.
Last week, McClintock again voiced his concerns. “Until there is a full public airing and resolution of the charges, the questions will remain, and a lingering pall of illegitimacy will stalk the new administration,” he said.
But he opposed the objections raised by Republican colleagues who moved to throw out electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania when Congress met to certify Biden’s victory.
“No one has ever claimed that ours is a perfect system. It is merely the best we have yet been able to design. And until we come up with something better, we owe it to our country, our Constitution and our posterity to stand by it and to respect its outcome, despite our wishes and suspicions,” he said.
Seven California Republicans sided with Trump and objected to electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania. Their effort failed after a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol. Congress certified the election results after the riot.
McClintock’s plea to stop the impeachment proceedings may be too late. Democrats Monday morning introduced an impeachment resolution charging Trump with “incitement of insurrection,” and the House plans to consider impeachment Wednesday.
An estimated 218 Democrats — a House majority — are seen as supporting the effort. One House Republican, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, has called on Trump to resign.
Otherwise, most Republicans are either opposed or have not taken a public stand. Democrats look to the dozens of Republicans who opposed the objections raised last week to the electoral votes in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
But the seven signers of the letter to Biden, led by Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado and including members from Kentucky, South Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin and North Dakota, made it clear impeachment is going too far.
“A presidential impeachment should not occur in the heat of the moment,” they wrote, “but rather after great deliberation.”
They said they planned to attend Biden’s inauguration — unlike Trump — but were concerned that impeachment “would be a further distraction to our nation at a time when millions of our fellow citizens are hurting because of the pandemic and the economic fallout.”
They called impeachment a “partisan effort.”
House Democrats tried Monday to vote seeking to have Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s Cabinet to use the 25th Amendment to oust Trump. Republicans blocked the effort, and a full House vote is expected Tuesday.
Unless Pence did take action to invoke the amendment, it’s expected the house would then vote on impeachment later this week. Chances are slim, though, that a Senate trial could begin before Biden takes office, since the Senate is not scheduled to return to the Capitol until January 19.
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