House Committee says Beshear, Cameron should not be impeached
The Kentucky House Impeachment Committee Tuesday recommended against impeaching Gov. Andy Beshear and Attorney General Daniel Cameron, ending a drawn-out process that has lasted since early January.
“The committee has found that none of the allegations made against the governor or the attorney general rise to the level of impeachable offenses,” said Rep. Jason Nemes, the committee’s chairman, after more than four and a half hours in executive session.
Unlike the other petitions filed in the committee, the Beshear and Cameron petitions were not dismissed outright. Instead, the committee voted to approve reports recommending that no further action be taken on the petitions.
Nemes said the petitioners will have to pay the costs incurred by the impeachment committee, but he did not yet know the total cost. He said the committee will ask Beshear and Cameron’s offices for their expenses responding to the petition.
“There were never any impeachable offenses in that petition,” Beshear said Wednesday. “I think they made the right choice. Now I hope that in Frankfort we can all be adults in the room and move forward and leave it behind, but we’ll see.”
Cameron’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For much of its existence, the committee has engaged in a “will they/won’t they” affair, fueled by long, late-night closed-door meetings that could have dragged down the state’s highest-ranking Democrat and a Republican widely seen as a potential successor to U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell.
The committee met eight times, often several hours at a time, to discuss the petitions in a process the members called grave and serious.
The two highest-profile petitions — one, filed by four public citizens against Beshear for the restrictions he imposed to limit the spread of COVID-19, the other filed by a Democratic attorney and three grand jurors over Cameron’s handling of the Breonna Taylor case — were tied together through much of the process.
Though both Beshear and Cameron’s attorneys repeatedly stated the petitions were without merit and should be dismissed, multiple times the committee came back seeking additional information.
For Beshear, they requested information on his orders limiting travel and any that affected religious gatherings. For Cameron, they wanted to the hear the instructions his office gave to the grand jury in the Taylor case, where the grand jury decided not to bring any charges against the officers who killed Taylor while executing a late-night warrant to search her apartment.
Neither petition ever advanced past the information gathering stage. The committee heard no testimony from the petitioners or the elected officials, relying mostly on responses to their requests for more information.
In their report on the Cameron petition, the committee said the filing had “procedural deficiencies” that would have warranted dismissal, but considered the allegations anyway because they were serious and a “summary dismissal would likely invite a subsequent petition.”
There were three main charges in the Cameron petition: that he misrepresented the findings of the grand jury in the Breonna Taylor case, that he helped incite the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and that he misused taxpayer funds.
The committee said the claims of inciting an insurrection and the misuse of funds were “frivolous” and said the claims of allegedly relaying false information in a press conference don’t rise to an impeachable offense.
“Even if the committee were to find that the Attorney General made a misstatement (which is does not), the committee would be hard pressed to find that a public officer could be impeached for merely misstating information at a voluntary press conference, perhaps inadvertently,” the report says.
The Beshear petition included eight charges that centered around the restrictions Beshear put in place to limit the spread of COVID-19 in March. This petition, too, the committee said had procedural deficiencies that warranted dismissal but likely would have resulted in another petition.
The committee’s response to the allegations significantly referenced the court cases that had been filed against Beshear for his executive orders in the early stage of the pandemic. It said the U.S. Supreme Court has “offered little guidance” on legal challenges to orders that impacted religious institutions but that such issues are best settled in the courts, through legislation and at the ballot box.
“As a practical matter, if a constitutional officer is impeached every time he or she loses in court, impeachment will lead to paralysis,” the committee said.
Ultimately, the committee said, that even if its members disagreed with Beshear’s orders (the committee had a majority Republicans, Beshear is a Democrat), there is a “high hurdle” for what is considered an impeachable offense.
“Impeachment overturns the election of the accused; its abuse is itself anti-democratic,” the committee said. “It must not be allowed to settle scores or re-litigate policy disputes.”
While the process of drafting these reports dragged on, the materials in the committee stacked up.
One petition, filed against Rep. Robert Goforth after he was indicted on domestic violence charges, was dismissed upon testimony from two University of Kentucky law professors who said representatives cannot be impeached. Three more petitions filed against Beshear were dismissed on their face. Motions to get Chairman Jason Nemes and Rep. Ed Massey to recuse themselves from the committee, based on Facebook posts, were denied.
With the legislature still in session, it’s possible that citizens will file more petitions, and motions will be sent to the committee.
“I’m hoping there are no more petitions,” said Rep. Angie Hatton, D-Whitesburg. “Just in case, most of us will be careful about the statements that we make.”
However, there is a bill in the House of Representatives that would put a stop to citizen impeachment petitions. House Bill 378 would only allow impeachment petitions to be filed by members of the Kentucky House of Representatives, not the general public. It has not yet been assigned to committee.
This story was originally published February 23, 2021 at 11:33 PM.
