Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) argued on Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s comparison of the ongoing impeachment inquiry against ...
“I think that if you had not been convinced of how unfit he is to lead this country, his invocation of lynching to describe what is happening to him in a fair, deliberate, democratic process, that should convince you beyond the shadow of a doubt,” O’Rourke told interviewer Robert Costa during a sit-down chat on The Washington Post Live.
Trump ignited a firestorm a day earlier by airing his frustration with the shifting impeachment investigation by referring to House Democrats’ handling of the process as a “lynching.” While the comparison drew an immediate backlash primarily from the left side of the aisle, some Republicans also distanced themselves from the remarks.
“So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights,” Trump said at the time. “All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here – a lynching. But we will WIN!”
Many Republicans, the president included, have become increasingly agitated that Democratic leadership has not only failed to hold a formal vote on impeachment proceedings, but has refused to even cite a high crime or misdemeanor over which the president would be potentially impeached.
“It just so happens that within the last week I was in Montgomery, Alabama, and I got to meet with my all-time hero in life – I think one of the greatest human beings, Bryan Stevenson,” O’Rourke said, referring to the American social justice activist and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. Stevenson initiated the National Memorial for Peace and Justice to commemorate victims of lynchings in the southern United States between 1877 and 1950, which O’Rourke noted that he had visited while in Alabama.
“When we use terror in this country to keep people down – through lynchings, through burnings, through drownings, through beatings – to be in that memorial, to listen to Bryan Stevenson, to understand our history,” O’Rourke said. “And then to have the most privileged, the most powerful white man on the face of the planet invoke that same word to describe what is happening to him, it’s one of the most obscene things that I’ve heard in American life in my lifetime.”
“And it goes to show the extent to which he will lie,” he continued. “The extent to which he will commit these obscenities, and the extent to which his administration and his presidency is unjust on every single level that matters.”
Costa, however, noted that following Trump’s remarks, footage has been circulating showing several top Democrats referring to former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings as a “lynching,” including by the Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden.
“Even if the President should be impeached, history is going to question whether or not this was just a partisan lynching … ” Biden said during an interview in 1998. The former vice president subsequently apologized for his choice of words, but accused Trump of deliberately using the term “lynching” to stoke a racial divide.
O’Rourke stated that while Biden said the wrong thing in 1998, he accepts his apology.
“He’s apologized for saying it, but nothing about the fact that he did this 21 years ago makes what the president is doing now okay,” O’Rourke said. “I think Vice President Biden was right to apologize and right to condemn president Trump for what he’s doing.”
No comments