Ocasio-Cortez: Impeaching Trump ‘No-Brainer’

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic-Socialist who will most likely be the youngest member of Congress next year, believes it is a “no-brainer” that President Donald Trump should be impeached.

On his Real America with Jorge Ramos show on Facebook Watch this week, the Univision anchor asked Ocasio-Cortez whether she wanted to impeach Trump once she got to Congress.

“I mean, yeah. To me, it’s a no-brainer,” Ocasio-Cortez replied to Ramos. “Well, I believe that he has violated the law. Violated potentially many laws, whether it’s the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution because he keeps his businesses open that foreign actors kind of participate in financial transactions with. Whether it’s what we are seeing with potentially illegal buyouts of campaign, you know, FEC violations of women that he is trying to silence.”

Ocasio-Cortez also said impeaching Trump should not be “beyond the pale” because of how Republicans impeached former President Bill Clinton for lying under oath.

“But overall, you look at the bar that the Republicans held for impeaching Bill Clinton and somehow impeaching Donald Trump is supposed to be beyond the pale? It seems ridiculous to me,” she added.

Though Ocasio-Cortez said she believes Trump should be impeached because he committed a crime, other Democrats like Rep. Al Green (D-TX) have insisted that Trump “does not have to commit a crime to be impeached.” In fact, Green has argued that Trump could be impeached simply for “harming society.”

“In fact, the president is not likely to be indicted, which means he’s not likely to be found guilty of a crime while he’s sitting, which means that if this comes before the House, it won’t come before the House as a president who has been found guilty, but rather as a president who is alleged to have committed certain offenses that are onerous to the Constitution and that harm society,” Green said during an August Democracy Now interview. “And what this president is doing is harming society.”

Top Democrats like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), aware that impeachment is not a popular issue among Americans, has previously said that talk of impeachment before the midterms would be a “gift” to Republicans. But left-wing Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez, egged on by the party’s left-wing base that may not settle for anything less than impeachment if Democrats take back the House, have been ignoring Pelosi’s warnings to be disciplined and not talk about impeachment before Special Counsel Robert Mueller concludes his investigation.