Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) doesn’t think impeaching President Donald Trump is the best way to hold his administration accountable for all the malfeasance and misrule that’s happened on their watch.
Asked how Democrats should put the White House in check after voters cited corruption as a major motivator this midterm cycle, Beshear told MS NOW host Peter Alexander that the party can’t just revert to its old, ineffective playbook.
“If Democrats try to impeach President Trump, everybody’s just going to run back to their camps,” he explained during Thursday’s episode of “State of Play.” “We’re not going to have an opportunity to move forward and beyond him.”
Instead, Beshear said Democrats should use their new majorities in the House and Senate to hold Cabinet secretaries and agency heads responsible for the harm they and their departments have caused.
At the top of his list was Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who the governor said has proven unfit “over and over,” even earning him and the Republican Party a wave of opposition from military veterans.
“We had a record number of veterans run as Democrats. Why? Because they see how our armed forces are being mishandled,” Beshear said.
Under Hegseth’s watch, the war in Iran has worn on for months, resulting in the deaths of 23 service members and a protracted rise in fuel costs.
At the same time, he’s fixated on ridding the military of “wokeness,” instilling a “warrior ethos” in troops, and gutting the top ranks of the armed forces of anyone he’s deemed disloyal.
As many Republicans blame the party’s midterm disappointment on widespread public dissatisfaction with the war, multiple outlets report an appetite to remove Hegseth and other top military leaders from their posts. Trump, however, has said he has “every intention” of keeping the former Fox News host in his position.
Beshear said another priority for the Democratic Party’s oversight should be Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom he slammed for “peddling conspiracy theories on safe vaccines that had defeated things like measles.”
“We have more measles cases in Kentucky this year than we have had in the last 35 years combined,” the governor said. “That is malpractice. That is more than just negligence, and, certainly, he should be held accountable for it.”
The Democratic Party’s leaders in Congress seem to agree that a third attempt to impeach Trump would be the wrong tactic.
On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told MS NOW impeachment was far from front of mind, saying, “The American people don’t want us to get even. They want us to get things done on their behalf because life is way too expensive.”