Over at The Atlantic, Tim Alberta has a fascinating piece on Peter Meijer‘s first year in the House. On the morning of the impeachment vote the newly elected Grand Rapids (Michigan’s 3rd District–Justin Amash‘s old seat) Republican received an encrypted message from a senior White House official urging him to vote for impeachment.
Here is a taste of Alberta’s piece:
For Meijer, the stillness was unsettling. He felt that impeachment was warranted—“The vice president and the next two in the line of succession were inside the Capitol as it was being assaulted,” he says, “and for three hours the president was nowhere to be found”—but he longed for a dialogue. Growing up, he’d heard the legend of how a family friend, President Gerald Ford, had pardoned Richard Nixon in an act of mercy after Nixon had resigned to avoid the humiliation of being impeached and removed. Meijer’s first political memory was made watching the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Even as a kid, he sensed that it was trouble for the country. Now, after just over a week in office, he was bracing himself to vote to impeach the president of the United States—a president from his own party—without so much as a caucus meeting where competing cases might be presented.
Meijer felt angry and betrayed, “like I’d seen something sacred get trampled on.” He told himself that Trump needed to pay. But he worried that a rash impeachment of the president might unleash an even uglier convulsion than the one he’d just survived. And he knew that by voting to impeach he might be committing “career suicide before my career ever began.” In the days leading up to the vote, Meijer says, he barely slept.
“It was the worst 96 hours of my life,” he says.
Whatever his final decision, Meijer didn’t want to blindside the people back in his district. So he began making calls. The conversations did not go well. Meijer remembers one man, “a prominent business leader in Grand Rapids,” arguing that the election had been stolen, that Trump was entitled to a second term, that Meijer was a pawn of the “deep state.” The man went “full QAnon,” spouting conspiracy theories and threatening him with vague but menacing consequences if he voted to impeach. Meijer was well acquainted with that kind of talk; one of his own siblings was fully in the grip of right-wing conspiracies. Even so, the conversation “shook me to my core,” Meijer says, “because the facade had been stripped away. It showed me just how bad this had gotten.”
After Meijer hung up, he leafed through a copy of The Federalist Papers, hoping for an epiphany. He texted with friends. He talked with his wife. Finally, he consulted a list he’d compiled of like-minded members with whom he wanted to compare notes. It was a short list, and Meijer had already talked with most of them: Liz Cheney of Wyoming; Adam Kinzinger of Illinois; Fred Upton, who represented a neighboring district in Michigan. But there was one he had yet to connect with: Anthony Gonzalez, a second-term congressman from Ohio.
When Meijer reached Gonzalez on the phone, the call turned into a therapy session. Meijer kept debating with himself; meanwhile, Gonzalez, who had also been ambivalent, grew ever more adamant that Trump must be impeached. Meijer asked his colleague to explain the source of his certainty. “I can convince myself not to vote for impeachment,” Gonzalez said. “But if my son asks me in 20 years why I didn’t vote for impeachment, I couldn’t convince him.”
The next morning, January 13, Meijer received an encrypted message just as he was arriving at the Capitol. It was from a senior White House official, someone who’d heard he was on the fence, urging the new congressman to vote for impeachment. Meijer was stunned, but he’d already made up his mind anyway. Later that day, he joined Gonzalez and eight other House Republicans in voting to impeach Trump. Meijer was the only freshman among them—and the only freshman in U.S. history to vote to impeach a president of his own party.
Read the rest here.