Republican Congressman calls for Trump’s impeachment, Gets standing ovation at event

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mi) received a long standing ovation Tuesday evening at his first public event since becoming the first Republican to call for President Trump‘s impeachment. At a Grand Rapids town hall in his home state of  Michigan, Amash criticized House GOP leadership, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Ca), calling him the “so-called leader.”

“I read the Mueller report. I’m sure he didn’t,” Amash said of McCarthy. “He resorted to ad hominem attacks; that’s the kind of ‘leadership’ we now have in Congress.”

Watch GOP Rep Justin Amash get a 30 second long standing ovation at the beginning of his town hall event. Amash is the first GOP Rep to say Trump should be impeached. Looks like his district agrees with him—and the rest of Sane America. #TheResistanceRises pic.twitter.com/RndCQjhaDa

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) May 28, 2019

It wasn’t all smooth, though, as things got heated when Amash took questions from the audience, and this Trump supporter.

Amash joined Democrats in the House earlier this month in calling for Trump’s impeachment, angering the President, who called him “a loser” and many of his fellow Republican Congressional colleagues.  In a lengthy Twitter thread Amash argued that  Trump’s conduct had met the constitutional standard for impeachment—and that Attorney General William Barr had “misled the public” about special counsel Robert Mueller findings on the president’s  “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

“While impeachment should be undertaken only in extraordinary circumstances, the risk we face in an environment of extreme partisanship is not that Congress will employ it as a remedy too often but rather that Congress will employ it so rarely that it cannot deter misconduct,” tweeted Amash. He added that he believed very few members of Congress had actually read the report.