Washington Isn’t the Only Place Where There Is Talk of Impeachment
Thousands of people across the country are dying each day due to COVID-19. Here in Kentucky, the COVID-related economic slowdown has left a lot of people struggling to afford food or rent. And even aside from the specific challenges of 2020-21, Kentucky has big structural issues, like adapting to an American economy that is less reliant on coal and having more people living below the poverty line than all but three other states.
But in the first two weeks of its yearly session, the GOP-dominated state legislature has concentrated on:
Making it harder to get an abortion in a state that already has a ton of abortion limits and only a handful of clinics where a woman can get an abortion. (A provision adopted by the legislature would allow Attorney General Daniel Cameron to more closely regulate abortion clinics. Cameron’s regulatory efforts are almost certain to be moves to make it harder for clinics to offer abortions and for women to get them, since GOP officials like Cameron across the country are constantly looking for ways to make it almost impossible to get an abortion even as Roe v. Wade remains on the books.)
Rebuking Gov. Andy Beshear and Secretary of State Michael Adams, who is a Republican, for making it easier for people to vote last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic. (Another provision adopted by the legislature would bar the governor or the secretary of state from changing electoral procedures without the legislature’s approval.)
Rebuking judges in the Frankfort area for not taking the Republicans’ positions often enough on major issues. (This provision would effectively remove some cases from the jurisdiction of the state appeals court in Frankfort.)
Rebuking Beshear for taking COVID-19 really seriously.
The main focus of the legislative session so far is on curtailing Beshear’s power, including provisions to limit any executive orders issued by Beshear to 30 days, unless the legislature approves of them, and stripping him of power to replace people on some key boards.
That reining in Beshear is one of the legislature’s top priorities is not surprising ---the state’s Republicans have been itching to punish the governor for taking command of the state amid the virus outbreak. Beshear acted aggressively and early to try to mitigate the virus’ spread and has pushed for mask-wearing and for schools and businesses to remain closed or allow people to work remotely. I am grateful that he has taken the virus outbreak really seriously---I truly think that Beshear’s actions saved lives in the state.
Can you imagine if Matt Bevin had won reelection and was in charge of the state during the COVID-19 outbreak? You don’t have to imagine too much---Bevin-like politicians such as President Trump, Govs Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Kim Reynolds of Iowa and Bill Lee of Tennessee have generally resisted the advice of medical experts on mask-wearing and other mitigation strategies. (This isn’t a totally partisan issue. Many Republican governors, such as Massachusetts’ Charlie Baker, Ohio’s Mike DeWine and Maryland’s Larry Hogan, have adopted similar policies to what Beshear has done here in Kentucky.)
Has every decision Beshear made amid the pandemic been perfect? No. And of course the governor should have some limits on his power. No one would defend a governor using executive authority to re-segregate Kentucky schools, for example. But the context is important here. Beshear was faced with a highly-unusual virus outbreak and needed to react quickly. He seems to have prioritized saving lives above anything else. And the legislature is full of Trump supporters who were likely to be wary of any policy that the president didn’t support. Remember that for months last year, while governors like DeWine and Beshear did everything possible to deal with the COVID-19, Trump was downplaying the virus’s spread and refusing to embrace policies like mask-wearing.
Also, the state’s Supreme Court upheld Beshear’s orders in a 7-0 ruling in November, so it’s not like he was too far out there.
Beshear’s actions on COVID-19 have given the Republicans in legislature the pretext for what they wanted to do even before the virus outbreak---make the governor’s office as weak as possible since a Democrat is there. A ton of bills were filed last year to weaken Beshear’s office, but weren’t pushed through.
There is another less-than-ideal aspect of the legislature’s behavior over the last two weeks. Bills in the Kentucky legislature can be publicly pre-filed, before the legislative session starts. So in theory, Republicans could have written up these bills last fall, had hearings on them, allowed public input and then started the legislative process in January. Instead, it appears that many of these provisions were only unveiled last week, making it hard for the press, experts and even legislators themselves to really absorb them. I suspect this lack of transparency was intentional, to make it easier to pass provisions that would be highly controversial if the public had a chance to absorb them. This is not an ideal governing approach.
It’s true that the Republican Party is popular in Kentucky (or maybe the Democratic Party is really unpopular) and the GOP has a huge majority in the legislature. So you could argue that Kentucky statehouse Republicans have a mandate to do whatever they want.
I am not so sure. It’s not clear that the Kentucky GOP’s legislative agenda is that popular. For example, polls suggest most Kentuckians like how Beshear has handled the COVID-19 outbreak and basically every Kentuckian I have talked to loved the expanded early and absentee voting this year created by Beshear and Adams. (This dynamic is true on the national stage too ---about half of American voters back Republican candidates but a much smaller bloc of voters supports major Republican policy initiatives like cutting Medicaid and drastically reducing taxes on corporations and the wealthy.)
But the legislature hasn’t stopped at stripping Beshear’s power. House Speaker David Osborne has created an impeachment committee in Kentucky’s House. Four anti-Beshear activists in the state have filed a petition calling for Beshear’s impeachment. Osborne says that according to a provision of Kentucky law this petition being filed means that the House is required to at least set up an impeachment committee. I tend to think, but obviously can’t prove, that Osborne might have found a way not to set up this committee (or done so very quietly) if Bevin had won a second term and there were liberal activists petitioning to impeach him. And when he was asked by reporters if Beshear should be impeached, Osborne declined to answer.
Osborne has suggested that he is not pushing impeachment himself. So perhaps there is a committee and nothing happens. That is the most-likely scenario. But even the mildest version of what is happening in Kentucky is that Republicans are kind of going through the motions of impeachment but not ready to press forward. In that scenario, Republicans are quasi-threatening Beshear with impeachment over his handling of COVID-19 last year---and hinting that they will move forward if he crosses them again on a big issue. This tact will almost certainly have a chilling effect on Beshear for the rest of his term. (And that might be the goal.)
But it’s worth considering another scenario: the impeachment process gets out of Osborne’s control. I am not predicting that this will happen, but it’s worth considering it. I spent most of the last two decades in Washington, watching the radicalization of the Republican Party that culminated with last week’s invasion of the Capitol. The violence there was pretty unprecedented and something I did not expect. But I was not surprised to see Trump supporters from across the country fly to Washington to protest the election results and to see that many of these people seemed to actually believe the election was stolen from Trump. I was also not surprised to see the majority of Republican U.S. House members vote to throw out the election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania.
For more than a decade, the national Republican Party has allowed its more radical members to promote falsehoods, such as Barack Obama being a socialist, that Obama was not born in the United States, that Obamacare included “death panels.” GOP leaders often refused to outright condemn these falsehoods, allowing them to gain greater currency on the right. Eventually, a person who pushed the birther conspiracies (Trump) became the GOP presidential nominee and then the president. And with Trump saying false things constantly and the most high-profile member of the party, it became even harder for the GOP to get off of this radical, post-truth course. With a huge bloc of Republican voters now convinced that the election was stolen from Trump, congressional Republicans last week faced two choices: admit a lot of what they and Trump had said about the election results were lies, or essentially keep the lie going, by suggesting Biden fraudulently won in Arizona and Pennsylvania? Unsurprisingly, most Republicans took the second course.
Here in Kentucky, many conservative activists have become convinced that Beshear is a power-hungry autocrat breaking all kinds of state laws and practices because he wants to shut down businesses and churches and control their lives. Many Republican officials have essentially echoed that theme, while very few of them have downplayed that idea and noted that Beshear is taking steps like Republican DeWine did in Ohio and that a 7-0 State Supreme Court ruling upheld Beshear’s actions. So my question is this: Have Kentucky GOP officials allowed the notion that Beshear is a crazy autocrat to become so pervasive in Kentucky conservative circles that no (or very few) GOP legislators will feel that they can vote against an effort to impeach Beshear? In other words, with the impeachment train started, how does it stop?
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