Republicans criticized the resolution that outlined how the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump would work moving forward, accusing Democrats of trying to use the resolution of trying to put a mask on a sham probe.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced on Monday that the House would vote on the resolution on Thursday. The text of the resolution was published on Tuesday.
Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, called the resolution “a bogus attempt to legitimize an ‘impeachment’ effort that doesn’t offer real fairness, due process, or transparency.”
“Democrats can’t un-poison the well,” he added.
“Just read the ‘impeachment’ resolution. I look forward to questioning Adam Schiff about the work he does behind closed doors, per the Ken Starr standard,” he said later.
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) said the resolution “protects and promotes tainted evidence” and includes “no due process” for the president.
“More secret Capitol basement hearings hidden from public! Republicans have no witness call rights. Kangaroo Court, Witch Hunt, Star Chamber continues!” he said in a statement.
“Having read the resolution, it’s clear: you can have due process if the Democrat chair or majority agrees to it,” added Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) in a statement.
Rep. Greg Pence (R-Ind.), brother of Vice President Mike Pence, said, “After seven weeks of running a communist-style, ultra-partisan effort to undo the 2016 election results under the disguise of a sham impeachment process, @SpeakerPelosi claims she wants to now add transparency to a widely discredited process.”
“@SpeakerPelosi needs to come clean and explain to the American people why she chooses to conduct a secret investigation that leaks cherry-picked information to the press rather than allowing every Representative to participate in this grossly flawed process,” he added.
Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) said in a statement: “Now Pelosi & Schiff want to pretend they are being transparent—after they corrupted & tainted the process for weeks in secret, keeping information from Members of Congress & the American people. Give me a break. Seems a little late for that.”
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said before the text was released that GOP members wouldn’t vote for the resolution.
“We’re not going to participate in helping them attempt to provide legitimacy to that process,” she said at a press conference on Capitol Hill.
“It really is shameful what the Democrats have been doing in terms of attempting to try to impeach a sitting president in the basement of the Capitol.”
“What the Democrats are now trying to do is they’ve basically cooked up a process they’ve been conducting in secret. The goal of the process, the aim of the process was very clearly to preclude the president’s counsel from asking questions of witnesses. The goal of their process was to preclude Republicans from being able to call any witnesses,” she added.
“They’ve now taken this process—they’ve gotten so much pressure because of the way they’ve been conducting the process—they’re now attempting to sort of put a cloak of legitimacy around this process by saying they’re going to bring it to a vote on the floor. They can’t fix it. The process is broken. It’s tainted,” she continued.
Democrats, meanwhile, have overwhelmingly said in public they support the impeachment inquiry, though no vote was conducted authorizing the probe. The slated vote on Thursday will mean “every member will have to make a decision based on their conscience,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said at a press conference.
“The overwhelming majority of the House Democratic caucus are publicly on record supporting the impeachment inquiry,” he said. “The resolution ... related to the next phase of an ongoing impeachment inquiry that the overwhelming majority of the House Democratic caucus already supports.”
