Trump blasts Rep. Justin Amash, who broke party ranks to say the Mueller report points to impeachable offenses. He also criticizes Alabama abortion ban.
President Trump on Sunday blasted the lone congressional Republican who has suggested the president has committed impeachable offenses, as party members — even sometime critics — closed ranks around the White House, denying that the evidence in the special counsel’s report suggests Trump acted to obstruct justice.
The president, who spent a sunny but humid Sunday at his Virginia golf course, branded Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) a “loser” for becoming the first member of his party to say that behavior laid out in Robert S. Mueller III’s report met the “threshold” for impeachment. Amash stopped short, however, of calling for impeachment proceedings to begin.
The president, somewhat uncharacteristically, waited 19 hours to fire back on Twitter, deriding the Michigan lawmaker as “a total lightweight” and suggesting that Amash, a libertarian who frequently breaks with Republican congressional leaders, was merely courting publicity — something that Trump, of course, provided him.
“Never a fan,” Trump wrote, calling Amash “a loser who sadly plays right into” the hands of Democrats.
In another bid to enforce party unity on a controversial topic, Trump also tweeted an implied rebuff of the sweeping abortion ban signed into law last week in Alabama. He joined other leading Republican lawmakers in repeating the long-standing party formula that abortions should be allowed in cases of rape or incest — exceptions that Alabama lawmakers refused to add to their anti-abortion law.
Trump said on Twitter that while “strongly Pro-Life,” he supports those exemptions, echoing statements made in recent days by the congressional GOP leaders, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
In recent months, Republicans have sought to take political advantage of Democratic moves to liberalize abortion laws in some states, including Virginia and New York, calling the Democrats “extreme” and saying the late-term abortions that some of the laws could allow amount to “infanticide.”
The Alabama law, and similar proposals in other conservative states, could blunt that effort by putting the Republican stamp on a proposal — forbidding all abortions except to save a woman’s life — that most Americans in both parties have consistently rejected.
