By Ed Kilgore
It is no secret that the idea of impeaching President Donald Trump has slowly evolved from a rage-filled liberal fantasy to a real, if remote, contingency should some of the worst suspicions about the president on the Russian or financial fronts prove credible — or if Trump uses his powers to stop investigations that might or might not bear impeachable fruit.
Senator Al Franken is warning Democrats to beware of a big problem with removing the 45th president from office: it would produce a 46th president named Mike Pence.
Here’s what Franken said in an interview published yesterday:
But he warned that the outcome of impeachment would not be the answer to Democratic dreams.
“Pence ran the transition and some of the very worst nominees, I felt — [EPA chief Scott] Pruitt, [Education Secretary Betsy] DeVos, [HHS Secretary Tom] Price, [Budget director Mick] Mulvaney — were Pence selections, clearly, I think,” Franken told IBT. “He’s ideological, I consider him a zealot, and I think that in terms of a lot of domestic policy certainly would be worse than Trump.”’
Franken went on to allow that Pence might be less dangerous than Trump in the foreign-policy arena. But still, the weighing of the pros and cons between the president and vice-president is a bit of a first, at least among Democrats with the stature of the junior senator from Minnesota.