Kentuckians who filed failed impeachment claims suing to avoid paying the costs
People who filed unsuccessful impeachment petitions against Gov. Andy Beshear and two other Kentucky officials are bucking more than $60,000 in bills they received for the costs of the cases.
Attorneys for the three groups of people filed a federal lawsuit Monday that seeks to strike down the state law under which they were billed.
The lawsuit argues the law violates the Constitutional rights of the people who filed the impeachment requests.
“The law has a clear chilling effect on those who wish to bring concerns to the legislature and to hold their elected officials accountable,” the lawsuit says.
A House committee handled three high-profile impeachment efforts this year.
In one, several people argued Beshear, a Democrat, should be removed from office over orders he issued aimed at containing the spread of COVID-19 cases and deaths, such as restrictions on restaurant capacity.
Beshear has said his orders saved lives and prevented costly illness.
A separate group asked the legislature to kick Attorney General Danial Cameron out of office over his handling of the case of Breonna Taylor, a Louisville woman shot to death in her home last year by police who came to serve a no-knock warrant in a drug case.
Some grand jurors said Cameron, a Republican, did not present them the option of charging police directly in Taylor’s death.
In the third case, a Madison County couple sought to impeach state Rep. Robert Goforth, a Republican from Laurel County, over a criminal charge that he strangled his wife during an argument.
Goforth has pleaded not guilty.
Beshear and Cameron said the impeachment petitions had no merit. Goforth argued the committee did not have the legal ability to consider the petition against him.
An impeachment committee of the state House of Representatives recommended dismissing the claims against Besehar and Cameron and decided the committee didn’t have the authority to impeach Goforth.
State law says people who bring an unsuccessful impeachment petition are liable for the costs involved in resolving it.
That includes legal costs of the committee and the officials facing impeachment, and the time put in by staff members.
“The law requires us to tax these costs,” Rep. Jason Nemes, a Louisville Republican who chaired the impeachment committee, said last week when the committee sent bills to people who filed the petitions..
The bill for those who wanted to impeach Beshear is $42,444. Nearly $18,000 of that is for the attorneys who defended the governor.
The bill in Cameron’s case is $7,597. It is lower because Cameron refused to submit itemized costs.
The bill for the Goforth case is $12,457.
The lawsuit filed Monday argues that the law on billing impeachment petitioners is fatally flawed for a number of reasons.
Those include that while citizens routinely approach legislators with requests on a wide range of issues that can require significant resources to deal with, impeachment is the only legislative process in which citizens can be charged for attorney fees and other costs.
That penalizes people based on the content of their speech, which is prohibited, the lawsuit argues.
If the interest in billing people for unsuccessful impeachment petitions is to discourage frivolous petitions, the law doesn’t accomplish that because the committee doesn’t have to rule that a petition was frivolous before billing someone, the lawsuit argues.
“If a petition is not advanced because it is deemed not politically expedient to do so, the petition will fail, even if well grounded,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit said the people who sought to remove Beshear, Cameron and Goforth did so in good faith.
Requiring people to pay for unsuccessful impeachment petitions “prices citizens with valid concern out of the market, rendering impeachment petitions a process that only wealthy citizens can afford to take part in,” the lawsuit argues. “This clear disparate impact renders the law unconstitutional.”
The complaint notes that the people suing to knock down the reimbursement law include both Democrats and Republicans.
“They could not disagree with each other more about the substance of what each group sought through their petitions, and yet they collectively agree on the importance of the rights at issue in this case,” the lawsuit says.
One of the attorneys involved in the federal lawsuit, Anna S. Whites, said she also filed objections to the bills with the impeachment committee Tuesday.
Those included that the committee hired “partisan” outside lawyers under a no-bid contract at inflated rates; didn’t actually investigate the allegations in the petitions; billed for costs that aren’t allowed; and billed only a few people when more than 100 filed petitions against Beshear.
In the petition involving Cameron, the impeachment committee should retract the bill and “issue a public apology to the Breonna Taylor family and the grand jurors for daring to show such disrespect,” Whites said in the objections.
The objections in Goforth’s case said the members of the committee “should be ashamed of their attempt to violate Kentucky law by billing private citizens in a clear attempt to shut down access to a basic freedom.”
In the federal lawsuit, Whites represents people who sought to impeach Cameron and Goforth. Christoper D. Wiest represents the petitioners against Beshear in the federal complaint.
The plaintiffs in that lawsuit are Andrew Cooperrider, Tony Wheatley, and Jacob Clark, who tried to get Beshear removed; Louisville attorney Kevin Glowgower and three unnamed people who filed a petition against Cameron; and Michael and Carol VanWinkle, who filed the Goforth petition.
The defendants are Beshear and Melissa Bybee-Fields, the clerk of the House.
It seeks a restraining order to bar collection of the impeachment costs; an order striking down the law; and attorney fees.
This story was originally published March 16, 2021 at 9:56 AM.
