Rep. Al Green of Texas is passing the Trump-impeachment torch to a fresh batch of House Democrats.
Mr. Green lost his Democratic primary and will be out of Congress in January, but he’s leaving behind a new group dedicated to carrying on his repeated bids to impeach President Trump.
He hosted a press conference Wednesday with the pro-impeachment group and expressed hope that the next Congress will finally oust Mr. Trump.
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“He must be impeached so that no other would-be authoritarian will take office and assume that he can do what this president has done,” said Mr. Green, best known for protesting, denouncing and waving his cane at Mr. Trump.
Standing beside him at the presser was Democratic member-elect Angela Gonzales-Torres of California, who is one of four “courage candidates” who signed a pledge from the group Courage For Democracy to support impeachment.
She vowed to force an impeachment vote out of the gate when sworn into Congress, saying, “We’re doing everything that we can now before we’re even sworn in.”
Ms. Gonzales-Torres pledged to carry on Mr. Green’s impeachment battle.
“We’re following in the footsteps of Al Green,” she said.
Three other victorious Democratic candidates signed onto the impeachment pledge: Victoria Broderick of Tennessee, Chris Rabb of Pennsylvania and Melat Kiros of Colorado.
The House has rejected several of Mr. Green’s impeachment attempts going back to 2017.
Most recently, the House voted 232-148 to defeat his impeachment resolution, which accused the president of “devolving the United States democratic republic into an authoritarian regime, where unjustified killings and cover-ups by ICE and CBP are normalized.”
House Democratic leaders have expressed doubts about whether impeachment is a valuable use of time.
“I haven’t had a single member of the House Democratic Caucus talk to me about impeachment,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the New York Democrat poised to become speaker, said after the election.
Mr. Trump already made history by being the first president impeached twice. Both times the Senate acquitted him, with votes falling well short of the two-thirds threshold required to convict.
Mr. Green grabbed headlines this Congress by being escorted out of the House chamber on two occasions for disrupting the president’s remarks to Congress.
Last year, the House censured him for standing in the House chamber during Mr. Trump’s remarks and waving his cane and shouting at him.
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