Heidi Gutman/Zuma
It didn’t take long for the candidates at Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate to call for President Donald Trump’s impeachment.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said that Congress needs to impeach Trump to ensure the survival of the Constitution. “This is about Donald Trump,” she said. “But understand, it’s about the next president and the next president and the next president and the future of this country. The impeachment must go forward.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) took to superlatives, calling Trump “the most corrupt president in the history of this country.”
“I think that the House will find him worthy of impeachment because of the emoluments clause,” he said. “This is a president who is enriching himself while using the Oval Office to do that, and that is outrageous.”
It’s not just incumbent on the House to impeach Trump, Sanders said. “Mitch McConnell has got to do the right thing and allow a free and fair trial in the Senate.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden said he agrees, reiterating what he said when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the start of an impeachment inquiry: that he’d support impeachment if the White House continued to stonewall Congress. Trump “is the most corrupt president in modern history, and I think all of our history,” he said. House Democrats “have no choice but to move.”
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said that, as a former prosecutor, she can tell Trump has shown a “clear consciousness of guilt.” She, like Biden and Sanders, referred to Trump as “corrupt.”
“Our framers imagined this moment, a moment where we would have a corrupt president,” she said. “And our framers then rightly designed our system of democracy to say there will be checks and balances. This is one of those moments, and so Congress must act.”
