'This Is The Absolute Breaking Point' -- How Democrats Finally Came Around on Impeachment
WASHINGTON — Andy Kim had finally seen enough.
Until Tuesday, the freshman congressman from New Jersey’s 3rd district had kept a wary distance from the debate over whether to impeach President Trump. Kim, who is 37, won his South Jersey district by a few thousand votes in 2018, ousting a Republican incumbent and helping Democrats regain the majority in the House of Representatives. The Democratic Party has named him one of its so-called frontline members who are running for reelection in tough districts and whose campaigns will get extra help from the party.
For months Kim resisted calls to throw his support behind impeachment. People shouted at him at town-hall meetings in his district but Kim refused to budge. Let the oversight committees do their work, he told his constituents. Yes, he said, the process was moving too slowly and the White House was dragging it out, but the time wasn’t right.
That changed on Tuesday. Before he got elected to Congress, Kim worked on the National Security Council in the Obama White House. His job included setting up calls with foreign leaders, and he sat in the Oval Office for some of those calls. It was on that same kind of call that President Trump in July reportedly pressured the new Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and whether years ago Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor. Kim could never have imagined a sitting president putting personal and political gain over national security. He couldn’t stay on the sidelines any longer.
“By urging the Ukrainian government to take action to influence our Democracy, Trump has violated [the] power [of the presidency] and the trust of the American people,” Kim said in a six-paragraph statement released on Tuesday. “If the facts are corroborated, that violation, and my understanding of its implications, has led me to come to the conclusion that the President has committed an impeachable offense.”
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/impeachment-trump-pelosi-andy-kim-ukraine-democrat-890306/