Speier demands Trump’s removal
Rep. Jackie Speier is convinced President Trump won’t finish his four years in office and she’s doing everything she can to hurry him out the Oval Office door.
The Hillsborough Democrat has called for Trump to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment, which allows the vice president and two-thirds of the Cabinet to declare a president unfit. In his first seven months in office, Trump has shown “erratic behavior and lack of mental capacity” that makes him incapable of serving as president, Speier said in a Thursday interview with The Chronicle’s editorial board.
Trump’s promise to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea, his changing takes on the rally in Charlottesville, Va., last week and the “over 1,000 lies” she said he has told and been rebuked
for in recent months are more than enough to show that keeping Trump in office is a threat to the nation’s security, she said.
“I don’t think he’ll serve out his term, in any case,” Speier said. “I don’t think he likes the job. And once that real crisis occurs, I don’t think he’ll want to handle it.”
Trump could even find himself in prison for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, she said. The 1977 law bars U.S. businesses from paying bribes to foreign officials and requires them to ensure they are not being used to launder foreign money through the sale of real estate and other assets.
“There are people who think” Trump will be facing prison time, Speier added.
Republicans and Democrats alike “are whispering what I’m saying publicly,” she said, adding that “I’ve gotten a lot of heat for it.”
But questions about Trump, his temperament and his mental stability have become more than whispers in recent weeks, especially from politicians in California, where the developer-turnedpolitician has few friends.
Besides Speier’s unprecedented call to invoke the 25th Amendment, Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance (Los Angeles County), has called for legislation requiring a psychiatrist to be present at the White House, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, has introduced a congressional resolution calling for Trump to undergo a physical and mental evaluation to see if he’s fit to remain president.
Rep. Brad Sherman, DSherman Oaks (Los Angeles County), has taken the oust Trump effort a step further, last month introducing articles of impeachment against the president.
The concerns have become visible enough that the White House has been forced to respond, especially now that Republicans are starting to grumble.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders fired back at Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, who last week said Trump hasn’t demonstrated the “stability” or “competence” he needs to display as president.
“I think that’s a ridiculous and outrageous claim that doesn’t dignify a response from this podium,” Sanders said Thursday, in the White House’s first response to Corker’s comments.
With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and every member of the Cabinet serving at the president’s will, getting the twothirds vote needed to remove Trump is unlikely, but Speier is convinced it can be done.
Calling for the 25th Amendment to be invoked “puts Vice President Pence and the Cabinet on notice that they’re responsible” for ensuring that Trump is competent to run the country and can be trusted with the nation’s nuclear arsenal, Speier said.
Having Republican leaders tasked with determining whether Trump should stay in office would carry far more weight with the GOPcontrolled Congress than if Democrats were directly involved.
“If the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet members made that decision,” it’s likely that enough Republicans in Congress would sign on to remove Trump, she said. And if they called for his ouster, Speier believes it’s likely the president would quickly resign.
“I’m not a medical doctor, but the 25th Amendment doesn’t require one,” Speier added. “It’s a matter of evaluation.”
Speier’s anti-Trump efforts are raising questions among her fellow Democrats, who worry that a total focus on the president takes away from the party’s efforts to convince voters that they have positive plans for the future.
San Francisco Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, suggested Tuesday that many of the congressional efforts against Trump were distractions, since the Republicans in control will never let them come up for a vote.
“Pelosi is probably upset because all these efforts are coming from her own state of California,” said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at San Diego State University. “She likely wants them to hold their fire until they see the whites of their eyes” and not take individual actions that are likely to be ineffective.
But the nation’s security is her only concern, Speier insisted.
“This isn’t about politics,” she said. “Yes, I would rather have Mike Pence there (as president). It’s about the national security of this country. It’s about the stability of the country.”
As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Speier is at the center of the investigation into Russia’s purported efforts to involve itself in the 2016 presidential election and any possible links Russia supporters might have had with the Trump campaign.
The committee’s main job is to determine “how, when, where and why” Russia intervened in the election and make recommendations about what can be done to make sure it doesn’t happen again, Speier said.
The question of impeachment isn’t likely to be brought up before her committee, “nor should it,” she added.
But even if Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is conducting a criminal investigation into any Russian connections with the election and the Trump campaign, comes up with indictments that lead to an impeachment trial, that’s a far slower process than the 25th Amendment when it comes to removing a president, Speier said.
“I don’t know how much time we have,” she said.