Colorado gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo says that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama should be impeached.
Tancredo said impeachment would avoid setting a precedent for the next “dictator in chief,” according to comments reported by Red Dirt Report, an Oklahoma news website.
The former congressman spoke at a rally in Oklahoma City Thursday protesting Holder’s planned appearance at a police cadet graduation ceremony. Holder abruptly canceled his appearance, “an outcome this right-wing crowd viewed as a victory,” the website reported.
In comments after his public speech, Tancredo said Obama should be impeached because he “trashes the Constitution,” according to Red Dirt Report.
“Nobody should be surprised we have someone who is destroying the Constitution, step-by-step, methodically, because he promised us he would do that when he ran,” Tancredo told the website. “Obama said that he would fundamentally transform America.”
“Well, how the hell do you do that?” he continued. “How he does it is that he destroys the Constitution, creates a socialist system and so we shouldn’t be surprised by him and we shouldn’t be surprised by Eric Holder, who refuses to uphold the law and trashes the Constitution.”
While Tancredo was in Oklahoma, three other contenders for the GOP nomination held a televised debate in Denver. Tancredo has sworn off primary debates, saying it hurts the eventual nominee to engage in attacks on other Republicans.
Tancredo was in Oklahoma for a fundraiser, campaign manager Brian Dotterer told The Daily Caller News Foundation, not specifically to attend the Holder protest rally.
It’s not the first time Tancredo has called for the president’s impeachment. In February, he wrote an op-ed in the World Net Daily advocating impeachment and in 2010, he said Obama should be impeached because he is a “more serious threat than Al Qaeda,” which Fox News’s Megyn Kelly called “ridiculous.”
Republican Oklahoma state Rep. Mike Turner told the Washington Free Beacon that Holder’s appearance at a law enforcement ceremony was “inappropriate” because of Holder’s involvement in the Operation Fast and Furious scandal.
“A lot of people just felt that it was very inappropriate for this man, with his track record, to speak to law enforcement officers that demand and expect to be backed up by the government working on behalf of the citizens, not against the citizens,” Turner told the Beacon.
Tancredo said Congress should impeach Obama.
“[T]he problem is, if you don’t impeach him, if you don’t impeach both the president and the attorney general, what you have done is you have established precedence for the next ‘dictator-in-chief,’” he’s quoted as saying in the Red Dirt Report.
“Because how could you hold the next guy more accountable than the former, if no one had the guts to bring impeachment because he’s the first black president — which is certainly one reason why it has not happened — then you cannot be surprised if the next one and the next one and the next one just carries it one more step and we truly lose our freedom,” he continued. “It’s actually that serious.”
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