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Congressman Aderholt Statement on Democrat Impeachment Vote

October 31, 2019

Washington — Today, Congressman Robert Aderholt, (AL-04) released the following statement on the vote to formally open impeachment proceedings against President Trump.

"The Democrats have now made official, what they have been wanting to do since January 20, 2017," said Congressman Robert Aderholt, "and that is try and overturn the 2016 election. Impeachment has been their only agenda since President Trump was elected, and they've spent the last 10 months since they took over the House trying to find a way to do so."

"I voted no! While Congress does have the CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY to impeach a President, it was meant to only be used as a response to actual crimes committed by a President. So far, in what little information the Democrats have selectively leaked, I've seen nothing that rises to the level of overturning an American election.

"Since the election three years ago, a national newspaper's tag line has been "Democracy Dies in Darkness." It's too bad that our Democracy is dying in the darkness of this impeachment process. The process passed by Democrats reverses procedures used in the Nixon and Clinton impeachment investigations. For those two investigations, the President's staff could examine evidence, ask questions of witnesses and attend hearings. Members of Congress from the Minority Party could issue subpoenas without the Chairman's permission. Even with today's vote, the Democrat impeachment process keeps the investigation behind closed doors for at least the next few weeks. This is wrong.

"It's time for Democratic leadership to accept that the Russians did not cause Hillary Clinton to lose, but that the voters simply chose Donald Trump over the prospects of granting a Clinton four more years in the White House.

"The American people elected us here to work for them—to negotiate deals that improve trade, drug pricing, healthcare, infrastructure and aim to fix some of the biggest issues we face as a country. It seems that Democratic leadership would rather waste more even more time and taxpayer dollars on yet another pointless investigation that does nothing to answer the problems we were elected here to fix. "