U.S. Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN-02) was faced with a number of questions about her support for the impeachment inquiry during a Saturday town hall and claimed the inquiry would be easier to support if it were against “a Democratic president.”
The event marked Craig’s 11th town hall since entering Congress and was hosted at Oak Crest Elementary in Belle Plaine.
She began by discussing her top four priorities in Congress, which include lowering the cost of health care and prescription drugs, transportation and infrastructure funding, promoting career and technical education, and helping family farmers.
Many constituents, however, were more interested in asking Craig about her support for the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. One attendee asked the first-term congresswoman to name “a specific impeachable crime and the evidence for it.”
“It’s so interesting because as the public hearings have been ongoing for the last couple of weeks, people often ask me what do I think about this testimony or that testimony. Well, the truth is, I was in a five-hour Transportation and Infrastructure Committee markup on Thursday. I had [Agriculture] Committee hearings and also Small Business Committee markups this week, so the American public in these public hearings are probably seeing this more real-time than I am,” Craig replied.
She then said she will wait for the House Judiciary Committee to decide “whether and what to present to the full House” before making “any judgments on that.”
“I will tell you though, and I’ve said this previously, I think that it is disturbing when a sitting president asks a foreign power for a political favor and appropriately, congressionally funded money for military assistance is withheld until that favor is granted. So it was concerning enough that I thought we needed to get the facts on the table. We need to let the process work itself through, and we’re not through the process yet,” she added.
Another constituent asked Craig if she would have “voted for an inquiry had it been a Democratic president who had done the same things.”
“Look, I represent a Republican district in Minnesota. You know, to me this is not about politics. I didn’t run for Congress to be able to vote for an impeachment inquiry against this president. In fact, this was the hardest decision to support this inquiry that I’ve had to make as a member of Congress,” she replied.
“So the truth is it might have been easier if this was a Democratic president because I don’t know what the politics are in this congressional district, but I can tell you this: my job is just to do the right thing based on the evidence,” Craig concluded.
President Trump won Minnesota’s Second Congressional District by just over one percentage point in the 2016 election while Craig defeated incumbent Republican Jason Lewis in 2018. She didn’t announce her support for an inquiry until late September, saying it was clear to her that Trump “placed his own person interests above the national security of the United States.”
The full Saturday town hall can be watched below:
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Anthony Gockowski is managing editor of Battleground State News, The Ohio Star, and The Minnesota Sun. Follow Anthony on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Background Photo “Angie Craig Townhall” by Angie Craig.
