U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, 2nd District, shown at an event in Lewiston in November, said Monday he would support President Trump’s impeachment “without reservation.” Daryn Slover/Sun Journal Buy this Photo
As the House prepared to impeach President Trump for a second time, Rep. Jared Golden announced Monday evening that he will support the effort.
Golden, a two-term Democrat representing Maine’s 2nd District, joins Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-1st District, in seeking the president’s removal for fomenting the deadly mob attack on the U.S. Capitol intended to overturn a democratic election and keep himself in power.
“I will vote to impeach the president for the incitement of insurrection, an act which clearly meets the threshold of a ‘high crime or misdemeanor’ set forth by the Framers,” Golden said in a statement. “I do this without reservation, as I have no question or doubt about the president’s conduct and responsibility for last week’s assault upon the United States Capitol and the United States Congress.”
“To be clear, the 2020 election was both free and fair, and its results are fully legitimate. In claiming otherwise, the president, members of his cabinet and administration, and some members of Congress have knowingly lied to the American public,” he added, and said Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 “were even more vile.”
“In the history of our country, I do not believe there has ever been a clearer case for the immediate impeachment of a president, as well as for his removal from office and disqualification from holding future public office,” Golden said.
For several days, Golden had not indicated if he would support the impeachment effort and late Monday afternoon he was still one of only a handful of House Democrats who had not signed on as a co-sponsor of the article of impeachment.
Pingree has been strongly pushing for Trump’s prompt removal in the wake of the deadly assault on Congress, in which five people died including a Capitol police officer reportedly beaten to death with a fire extinguisher. She told the Press Herald Monday morning that she would prefer that Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s Cabinet remove the president via the 25th Amendment as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has asked they do no later than Wednesday morning, when impeachment proceedings commence.
“We want the president out of office, and unlike impeachment that would happen immediately and would reduce the danger the country faces with having him know the nuclear codes and doing the kind of destruction he has been undertaking in questioning the election,” Pingree said.
“We didn’t want to drag the Congress back to Washington this week and have the Senate caught up in a trial while we have serious issues to deal with, but if it’s our only alternative to make a statement about the president instigating an insurgency on the Capitol I think we have to do it,” she added.
Maine’s senators – who would vote to decide if Trump would actually be removed from office – have avoided taking a stance on the impeachment process.
Sen. Susan Collins, New England’s last remaining congressional Republican, has said she will not be commenting on the effort because she and other senators serve as “jurors” in the potential trial of the president.
Sen. Angus King has expressed support for the removal of the president via the 25th Amendment but has not revealed his views on impeachment. His office said it had no new information to share Monday.
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