How much did it cost to file the impeachment petitions against Beshear and Cameron?
The House Impeachment Committee Friday forked over the bill to the people who filed failed petitions to oust Gov. Andy Beshear, Attorney General Daniel Cameron and Rep. Robert Goforth, R-East Bernstadt.
The committee sent three letters — one for each of the impeachment petitions on which they took action — charging the petitioners a total of $62,498.
Beshear’s petitioners will have to pay $42,444, Cameron’s petitioners will have to pay $7,597 and Goforth’s petitioners will have to pay $12,457. That includes the cost of the lawyer hired by the committee, bills submitted by the people defending the petitions, attorneys who testified, the staff members working on the committee and the Kentucky State Police.
“The law requires us to tax these costs. That’s what we’ve done,” said Rep. Jason Nemes, R-Louisville. “The committee is not taking a position, we’re doing our job under the law.”
Nemes said the Beshear petition cost more because his office submitted their expenses, while Cameron’s office did not. Beshear’s petition was also filed a few weeks before the other petitions, which meant the cost of staff and security was not divided.
The petitioners will have the ability to object.
The final bill will likely put a cap on what has been a long-stretching oddity of the session, a largely unprecedented committee where lawmakers spent several hours mulling over petitions to impeach two of Kentucky’s highest profile politicians.
Last month, the committee decided to recommend against impeaching Beshear and Cameron and concluded that members of the House of Representatives are not able to be impeached. But not before racking up thousands in expenses.
While Beshear’s office handed over a bill of cost to the committee that totaled just under $18,000, Cameron’s office twice refused to tell the committee how much it had cost the taxpayers to respond to the impeachment petition.
In a letter to the committee on March 9, Deputy Attorney General Victor Maddox said the office agreed that charging petitioners could help discourage “baseless petitions” in the future, but said the attorney general’s office didn’t want to deal with a potential lengthy court battle.
“There is no doubt that the purpose of filing the petition was an attempt to inflict political damage rather than achieve a legal result, and we know the playbook were we to submit a bill of costs,” Maddox said. “We would be forced to use state resources to litigate through circuit court and an inevitable appeal that would be decided years from now.”
Rep. Angie Hatton, D-Whitesburg, said she would have liked Cameron to have provided a bill if taxpayer money was spent defending him against the petition.
“The committee went back and asked again for his expenses because if taxpayer money was expended, that should have been charged,” Hatton said.
There is still a chance that the House of Representatives can receive more impeachment petitions in the final days of the legislative session. On Friday, the impeachment committee received another petition to impeach Beshear. It was immediately dismissed.
