Following the reports over the weekend that there's finally a single crack in the Republican dam of Trump support with Michigan GOP Rep. Justin Amash breaking from his party, and calling for Trump's impeachment, CNN regular and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum was one of the first out of the gate to deliver his party's talking points in response.
According to Santorum, Amash is an outlier who never liked Trump, and pretending that impeaching someone who is as extremely unpopular as Trump would be just like the Republicans and their overreach when they impeached Bill Clinton over lying about sex. Thankfully his fellow guest on this Sunday's State of the Union, Bakari Sellers, reminded everyone why the scenario during the Nixon days is the more likely scenario we're going to see play out if Democrats do start impeachment hearings.
Sellers was asked about spineless Mitt Romney's interview earlier that same hour, and the fact that the Republican controlled Senate will never, ever vote to impeach Trump, and Sellers laid out very plainly what the question is for all members of Congress if they refuse to act in the face of such blatant criminality.
The reason being is because the president is not above the law and Mueller lays this out. We saw the same thing with Nixon. What happened was over time, the American public, the more and more came out, the American public got on board, and right now I think there is a absolute case for obstruction of justice that as has been laid out, and so what if it doesn't get through the Senate? The fact is, do your job in the House and we'll worry about it later.
Santorum did his best to try to muddy the waters for Trump, but immediately had his lies shot down by host Jake Tapper, and his fellow panel members, Sellers and Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
TAPPER: He didn't not find it. He laid out a case and said it's up to Congress to decide.
SANTORUM: Well, but that -- again, he didn't find it -- he didn't make the conclusion that it was, so that's number one.
JAYAPAL: But he also didn't say it wasn't. That was very clear.
TAPPER: He said according to the Office of Legal Counsel memo, a sitting president cannot be indicted and he was going to stick to that.
SANTORUM: The reality is it's hard to obstruct justice when there wasn't an underlying crime to obstruct.
TAPPER: That's not true.
SANTORUM: Well, I think it is true.
SELLERS: The Department of Justice literally just indicted a former FBI agent, a former FBI agent, for obstruction of justice when there was no crime –
TAPPER: It does happen all the time.
SANTORUM: It's always in the president's purview, as leader of the country to do the things that he did. He can hire people, he can fire people. He doesn't have to have an excuse that fits your excuse to do so. So the reality is, in my opinion, and I think most Americans, there was no obstruction of justice here.
And the fact that Amash is doing this, look, we see this in the Senate all the time when Rand Paul joins the Democrats. That doesn't make it bipartisan. You have a Libertarian who's very much outside the scope of where the Republican party is, and he's joined the Democrats. This is not unusual. What I would say is, that he may be doing the president a favor because if the Democrats decide based upon this to go on the impeachment track, that's a bonus for Donald Trump right now.
JAYAPAL: You know, I would just say this is more of the Barr spin. We saw very clearly a four-page supposed “summary” that was not a summary coming from the Attorney General that attempted to distort the facts that are actually in the Mueller investigation, so much so that Robert Mueller had to send two letters to say, this is not an appropriate summary, and, in fact, why didn't you just use the summary – (crosstalk) He said it misrepresented --
After former Utah Rep. Mia Love made the ridiculous assertion that most of the public was ready to “move on” and backed up Santorum's prediction that impeachment would play into Trump's hands, Sellers again made the case for why public opinion shouldn't matter given the behavior we've seen from Trump and his corrupt Attorney General.
CNN knows this is what they're going to get from Santorum every time they have him on the air. It's shameful they continue to have him on for the sake of some sort of fake "balance."
