By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Congressman Sam Graves doesn’t expect Congress to do much when it returns to business this week.
Graves says Congress has been focused on only one thing.
“Impeachment is the only thing that’s happening,” Graves tells host Barry Birr on the KFEQ Hotline. “There’s no infrastructure bill. There’s no spending bill. There’s no trade bill; there’s nothing. It’s just impeachment.”
Impeachment hearings have shifted from the House Intelligence Committee to the House Judiciary Committee, which plans to hold hearings this week.
Graves, a Republican, says Democrats who hate President Donald Trump and want him removed from office have put pressure on their leaders to halt work on any legislation which might be a win for the president, such as the infrastructure bill which Graves says was working its way through the process.
“The word came down from the Speaker’s office that we will stop. That’s it. There will be no infrastructure bill. Cease doing the work on it,” according to Graves. “That pressure was coming from those folks that don’t want to give the president any win whatsoever and he had his fingerprints all over that infrastructure bill. He had talked about it. He had campaigned on it.”
Graves says the trade agreement reached with Canada and Mexico to replace NAFTA also has been held hostage while the House considers whether to impeach Trump.
Graves wasn’t impressed by the testimony provided during the House Intelligence Committee impeachment hearings.
“You can’t impeach somebody just because you hate him,” Graves says. “You can’t impeach somebody on hearsay.”
Graves says you can disagree with Trump’s methods and his message.
“But, he is very effective at doing those things and getting the things done that he talked about and moving forward and it’s extraordinarily frustrating to those folks,” Graves contends. “I think there are many in Congress right now that wake up every morning just trying to figure out how to hate him more.”
House committees have been investigating whether Trump committed an impeachable act during a July call to the president of Ukraine, in which it appeared Trump threatened to withhold military aid unless Ukraine investigated the role Vice President Joe Biden and his son played during Hunter Biden’s tenure on the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company.