Swing District Michigan Dem Elise Slotkin Announces Support for Impeachment
Freshman Representative Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.), whose district voted for President Trump in the 2016 elections, announced on Monday that she would support both articles of impeachment against the President.
Slotkin, a former CIA officer, was one of several freshman Democrats to call for impeaching Trump in a a September op-ed in the Washington Post. However, the representative faced considerable backlash in her district, and was sometimes heckled in town hall meetings held with constituents.
Slotkin told CNN on Wednesday that she was undecided on whether to impeach the President. She said the phones in her office were “ringing off the hook,” and she was receiving input from constituents on “both sides” of the issue.
“The vote that we will take this week will be on two articles of impeachment…I will be voting yes on both,” Slotkin wrote in an op-ed published Monday by the Detroit Free Press.
“Over the past few months, I’ve been told more times that I can count that the vote I’ll be casting this week will mark the end of my short political career. That may be,” Slotkin wrote. “But in the national security world that I come from, we are trained to make hard calls on things, even if they are unpopular, if we believe the security of the country is at stake.”
The articles of impeachment against President Trump, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, are expected to pass with a comfortable majority in the House. However, support for and opposition to impeachment currently fall almost completely within party lines, with no Republicans planning to vote for impeachment and only one Democrat publicly opposing. (The second Democratic Representative to oppose impeachment, Jeff Van Drew, is expected to become a Republican.)
Moderate Democrats have expressed concern that a vote for impeachment will hurt their chances of reelection, especially for those in swing districts. Some have suggested censuring President Trump for his actions regarding Ukraine instead of voting to impeach him, but the idea has been dismissed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
