Representative Bradley Byrne (R-AL) wants to point out the double standard President Donald Trump is facing with impeachment to his Democrat congressional colleagues and the public.
On Tuesday during deliberations of how the House of Representatives should proceed with impeachment before the body’s Rules Committee, Byrne put forth an amendment stating that former President Barack Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder “should have been impeached” for the Obama administration’s response to congressional into the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal.
Just filed an amendment for today’s #impeachment hearing. Democrats impeaching @realDonaldTrump were just fine with Obama & Eric Holder stonewalling Congress over Fast and Furious. My amendment makes clear Democrats should have supported impeaching both of them. #Hypocrisy pic.twitter.com/F0CiBeX23G
— Rep. Bradley Byrne (@RepByrne) December 17, 2019
In an interview with Huntsville, AL radio’s WVNN, Byrne, who is also running for the U.S. Senate seat up in Alabama in 2020, laid out his approach and his justification for the amendment.
“One of the articles is on abuse of Congress, which is something I’ve never heard of before,” he said on Tuesday’s “The Jeff Poor Show.” “But it is based on Donald Trump’s not just willy-nilly and allowing people that work for him to show up for some of these hearings and also not just produce documents willy-nilly. What I do is I take most of that out, and I put in its place a relation of the facts of this ‘Fast and Furious’ investigation when President Obama was president. We sent a bunch of guns down into Mexico, and some of those guns came back into this country and were used to kill some of our law enforcement agents.”
“The Obama administration tried to hide it,” Byrne continued. “They tried to keep documents from Congress. And Congress actually voted to hold them in contempt — Eric Holder, the attorney general, and the President. All of these Democrats that are so high and mighty about impeaching President Trump actually voted against holding Eric Holder and President Obama in contempt. Now they are speaking out of both sides of their mouth. The purpose of my mind amendment is to show hypocrisy.”
Byrne explained the primary purpose of the amendment was not just to point out hypocrisy to his Democrat colleagues, but for the public as well.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have held them in contempt — maybe we should have voted to impeach them, now that they have got a new standard for impeachment,” Byrne added. “Part of the message I’m sending them today is, ‘Wait a minute, guys. You’re not always going to have a president you don’t like in office. You may have a president you do like in office. We may take your precedent and use it against a president that you like.’ We’re cheapening impeachment. That’s my point here. I hope they get his message, and more importantly, I hope the public receives this message.”
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