Republican asks CPAC about impeachment hearings - and receives an unexpected response | indy100

Gergely Besenyei/AFP via Getty Images

Some audience participation at the Conservative Political Action Conference (or CPAC, for short) backfired this week, after Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union asked the crowd if they wanted to see fresh impeachment hearings for US president Donald Trump.

In case you’ve somehow forgotten, the 79-year-old made history during his first term when he became the first president to be impeached twice – first in 2019 over pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political rival Joe Biden while withholding aid to the country, and then again in 2021 following the January 6 riots.

In both instances, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives, but acquitted in the Senate trials.

And now, just days after impeachment odds soared to a record high of 69 per cent on a popular online betting site, Schlapp checked the mood of conservatives around another potential impeachment.

He asked CPAC attendees on Friday: “How many of you would like to see impeachment hearings?”

After the question was met with cheers – yes, cheers - he said: “No, that was the wrong answer.

“We’ll try it again. How many of you would like to see impeachment hearings?”

And again, the crowd cheered.

“No,” Schlapp said in response, laughing awkwardly. “Can someone bring some coffee out… We’ve got to keep this House majority, how many of you agree with that?”

Finally, Schlapp got the cheers he was looking for in the first place.

The reference to the House majority comes ahead of November’s midterm elections, where all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate are up for election.

As things currently stand, Republicans have the majority in both the Senate and House of Representatives, but both pollsters and GOP supporters have indicated that the Republican Party may not do very well in the elections.

With the House of Representatives dealing with the first stage of any impeachment process, a Republican majority would stop things in their tracks.

And so, CPAC attendees expressing a desire for Trump to face impeachment yet again, in an unexpected response to Schlapp’s attempt to excite the crowd, has been met with ridicule and surprise from social media users:

“Lmao well that’s embarrassing,” tweeted Wu Tang is for the Children:

Lawyer and Democratic candidate George Conway wrote: “Sounds like the country is coming together on this”:

While another account commented: “The best part is he asks a second time and there’s still whooping from the crowd”:

Awkward…

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