Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Ted Cruz’s Challenger For Texas U.S. Senate Seat, Calls For Donald Trump’s Impeachment

Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) announced Tuesday that given President Donald Trump’s conciliatory behavior towards Russian President Vladimir Putin during the recent Helsinki Summit, he “would vote to impeach the president.”

On Monday, Trump cast doubt over his own intelligence agencies’ findings that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, noting that given Putin’s “powerful” denial, he didn’t “see any reason why it would be [Russia].”

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“Standing on stage in another country with the leader of another country who wants to and has sought to undermine this country, and to side with him over the United States — if I were asked to vote on this I would vote to impeach the president,” said O’Rourke, a three-term congressman told The Dallas News.

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“Impeachment, much like an indictment, shows that there is enough there for the case to proceed and at this point there is certainly enough there for the case to proceed.”

While talks of impeachment are not new, O’Rourke is one of the first congressman to publicly support it in the run-up to midterm elections. “He is the only major party candidate in America to call for impeachment,” said Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign manager Jeff Roe.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R – Texas) was quick to admonish O’Rourke for his statement, chalking it up to nothing more than a case of “partisan extremism” and a money grab for his congressional campaign. The two are currently competing for the Senate seat in Texas, where Cruz is the incumbent.

Cruz himself has maintained a more neutral stance on the matter, refusing to openly reprimand the president in a recent interview with CNN.

His comments have also been criticized as a form of political cowardice in an attempt at maintaining the vote of the state’s Republican majority. O’Rourke has since fired back, noting he “heard [Cruz] talk about Russia but I did not hear him say a word about the president’s conduct.”