WHIPPANY, N.J.—One of Representative Mikie Sherrill’s district directors began the town hall in a filled community center Monday night with her customary call for civility. Hanover Township Boy Scout Troop 155 led the crowd in the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance. An elementary school teacher sang a rousing national anthem. Everybody clapped and then sat down together in rows and rows of plastic folding chairs. Then came the first question.
“We sent you to Washington,” a woman began, “to get work done, for us and for our country, and it appears that for the last couple years all that has been going on is investigations.” Sitting in the front, I could almost feel people’s shoulders tense up. Everybody knew what was coming. The towheaded scouts had filed to the back. The adults had the floor now. And impeachment was in the air. “We honestly,” the woman continued, “can’t trust Adam Schiff …”
She was drowned out by a wall of noise. The space rippled with a mixture of boos and cheers and uncorked angst.
“Do you have a question?” a man yelled.
“Sit down!” another shouted.
“Excuse me!” Sherrill interjected. “We agreed to be respectful!”
This was Sherrill’s first town hall since the late September start of the formal impeachment inquiry directed at President Donald Trump—triggered, in part, by her, when the new Democratic congresswoman from this state’s 11th District, a mostly suburban Republican stronghold, joined six other moderate freshman members with national security backgrounds and called for impeachment hearings in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “We do not,” they wrote, “arrive at this conclusion lightly.”
Sherrill, after all, had spent months during the Mueller investigation toeing an increasingly tenuous line, urging caution and preaching patience. But the first rounds of reporting about the Ukraine scandal, she believed, had left her no choice but to change her mind. This impeachment process, she told me tearfully in her office on Capitol Hill, was a “1776 kind of fight”—a fight, potentially, for the continued existence of the democracy. She also said she knew she must explain clearly and carefully to her constituents why this extreme constitutional remedy had become a necessity.
It is a shithead from Politico.... what did you expect?
I heard them talking about it on warroom this morning, so went to find it, and posted it.....
I see that she is another on of these filthy piece of crap “national security” or “intelligence” democrats that they stuffed down everyone’s throats in those districts in 2018......