GOP House leaders go off the deep end over Donald Trump’s impeachment

| 9:30 pm EDT September 24, 2019
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Now that Donald Trump has been caught red-handed committing treason, and Nancy Pelosi has announced his impeachment, we’ve been watching carefully to see who within the Republican Party speaks up in Trump’s defense. After all, he needs as many allies signaling their support for him today as possible, if he wants any real hope of surviving this.

Today we saw Republican Senators unanimously vote in favor of a resolution calling for the whistleblower report to be publicly released, essentially choosing to cover their own backsides in case Donald Trump ends up going down. Then GOP Senator Mike Crapo made a point of announcing that he was declining to defend Trump, which spoke for itself. That’s notable to say the least. But the responses from Republican House leaders have been particularly notable.

First we saw GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy step in front of the cameras and give the most brief and generic defense of Donald Trump possible, while not even addressing the scandal in question. Doug Collins, the Republican ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, gave away the most when he tweeted this: “Speaker Pelosi’s decree changes absolutely nothing. As I have been telling Chairman Nadler for weeks, merely claiming the House is conducting an impeachment inquiry doesn’t make it so. Until the full House votes to authorize an inquiry, nobody is conducting a formal inquiry.”

That’s right, Donald Trump’s key ally Doug Collins is responding to Trump’s impeachment by simply pretending that impeachment isn’t happening. That’s a level of deep end denial that’s absurd even by Trumpian standards. It also means that Republican House leaders have absolutely no idea how to defend Trump’s criminal antics in this scandal.