On Tuesday, just weeks after Pennsylvania voters took control of the state House of Representatives away from Republicans for the first time in more than a decade, Speaker Bryan Cutler took to the main hallway of the Capitol and defiantly defended one of his leadership team's most controversial decisions: the impeachment of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.
During an election year in which Republicans across the country blamed Democrats for spikes in violent crime, Pennsylvania's House GOP went further than anyone, embarking on an unprecedented effort to remove Philadelphia's progressive district attorney only a year after the city's voters overwhelmingly re-elected him.
Critics slammed the impeachment process as a GOP effort to overrule the will of heavily-Democratic, mostly nonwhite voters in one of the country's largest cities. Legal experts criticized the use of impeachment — a tool of last resort that exists to preserve the integrity of government — for what they say is little more than a policy disagreement. And political observers say it's part of a disturbing trend reaching to the highest levels of government in which politicians try to wrestle away power that their rivals won through free and fair elections.
But state House Republicans defended it as a necessary step to remove a high-profile prosecutor during a record-breaking surge in gun crime in Philadelphia.
"Even when the Democrats in our chamber acknowledge a problem as serious as the failed policies and dangerous impacts of an inept district attorney, they refuse to take action," Cutler said.
Starting Tuesday, the Republican-controlled state Senate will take the first steps in a trial of Krasner that will likely stretch into next year, and that could culminate in the first vote to remove an elected official in Pennsylvania since 1994.
Senate Republicans lack the two-thirds majority needed to force him from office. That leaves three House impeachment managers with the daunting task of convincing enough Democrats to defy the voters in their largest electoral bastion.
The House's vote to impeach, which took place during the lame-duck session after this year's midterm election, when Democrats were on the cusp of winning a majority of seats, split almost exactly along party lines.
Almost — except for Rep. Mike Puskaric, R-Union.
Puskaric, the lone Republican to vote against impeachment, said House Republican leadership used the process as a campaign prop in their effort to weaken Democrats in a high-stakes midterm that they hoped would sweep their party into power in Harrisburg and Washington.
"I think they were attempting to make Krasner their villain for basically campaign or political purposes," said Puskaric, an outgoing second-term representative who lost his primary race to Andrew Kuzma in May.
Noting that Krasner hasn't been convicted of criminal wrongdoing, Puskaric said the House GOP leadership's decision to press on with the impeachment — even after voters handed them defeats across the state — lowered the bar for removal from office.
"The threshold had been you had to be charged and convicted of something. Then we could impeach you," Puskaric said.
What's more, Krasner's voters weighed in on his job performance just last year. They returned him to office for a second four-year term by a whopping 40-percentage-point margin.
"We're setting some dangerous, dangerous precedents here," Puskaric said.
A political weapon?
Once vanishingly rare, efforts to impeach elected officials have become increasingly common in recent years. Georgia Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the leading figures of her party's far right and a vocal denier of the 2020 election results, filed an impeachment resolution against President Joe Biden on his first full day in office. She has since filed five more, four against Biden and one against Attorney General Merrick Garland.
During Barack Obama's entire eight years as president, the GOP filed just four impeachment resolutions, none against Obama, according to congressional records. Through all of President George W. Bush's two terms, Democrats filed six — four of which came from a single far-left representative, Ohio's Dennis Kucinich.
But in the less than two years since Biden took office, Republicans have filed an unprecedented 14 impeachment resolutions, nine against Biden himself.
"We've seen it become more weaponized," said Chris Borick, director of the Institute of Public Opinion at Muhlenberg College.
Republicans say it's Democrats who ushered in this new era of partisan warfare by filing a dozen impeachment resolutions against former President Donald Trump, five of which were filed in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Trump remains the only president in history to be impeached twice, accounting for half of all presidential impeachments — a sign of just how rare the practice has historically been.
That could soon change. As far back as January, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, predicted that if Republicans took the House, Biden was likely to be impeached "whether it's justified or not." Since the election, GOP politicians have already begun threatening to remove top executive branch officials when they take control of the U.S. House in January.
Just last week, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who is in line to be House speaker, called on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to resign or face impeachment over the Biden Administration's border policies.
But history shows voters have been wary of attempts to force duly elected officials from office, often turning on the party that attempts it. Tying up the next Congress with what the public sees as politically motivated impeachment proceedings, rather than tackling myriad problems facing the nation, could be "politically disastrous" for Republicans, Borick said.
"Given the lack of anything that comes close to (an impeachable offense) in the public eye right now, it just would be insane," Borick said.
Even in the case of former President Bill Clinton, impeached for the felony of lying under oath, voters viewed Republicans' use of one of Congress' most sweeping powers as a major overreach. They turned on the GOP in the very next election.
"There have only been two times since World War II that the president's party gained seats" in a midterm, Borick said. "One of them was 1998, when Clinton gained seats at the height of impeachment."
That same political peril was on display in this month's midterms, when Pennsylvania's Republican ticket, which had the chance to retain the party's state House majority and capture the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat, collapsed.
"They lost the chamber. They lost the statewide elections," Borick said.
Cutler, in the recent Capitol press conference announcing his caucus' new leadership team, dismissed the notion that GOP leaders were to blame for the party's failures at the ballot box.
"The outcome of the 2022 elections for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives was not the result of any policy positions or political calculus," Cutler said, blaming it instead on district maps that were redrawn after the 2020 census.
The case against Krasner goes "far beyond political disagreements," said Rep. Tim Bonner, R-Pa, one of three legislators who will present the House GOP's case for removal to the Senate this week.
"I do not believe it's politically driven, although impeachment, by its very nature, is a political process," said Bonner, who served as an assistant district attorney in Mercer County for 18 years.
"There are certain laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that he's just said he's not going to enforce. And he is obligated, under the law, to enforce the laws that have been passed by the General Assembly," Bonner said.
Republicans also accuse Krasner of obstructing their investigation of him and of mishandling criminal cases.
"As a prosecutor I always try my case in the courtroom. I seldom make comments to the media. I think Mr. Krasner is deserving of that respectful treatment," Bonner said. "I'm looking for a just outcome for him as well as for the citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the evidence will decide what that just outcome may be."
Dems: Part of a pattern
But Democrats, including the embattled district attorney, see the impeachment effort as part of a nationwide pattern stretching back to the 2020 election and beyond of Republicans attempting to overturn election results — particularly in cities with nonwhite majorities.
"History will harshly judge this anti-democratic authoritarian effort to erase Philly's votes — votes by Black, brown, and broke people in Philadelphia. And voters will have the last word," Krasner said in a statement responding to the impeachment vote.
Many of the articles of impeachment center on Philadelphia's record-breaking violent crime during Krasner's time in office, something that's "not proper" for impeachment, said Bruce Ledewitz, a constitutional scholar at Duquesne University.
"Krasner cannot be legally impeached and removed from office because he's doing a bad job — if he's doing a bad job," Ledewitz said. "He can't even be impeached and removed from office because he's not enforcing all the laws. That's a matter of prosecutorial discretion," the leeway that allows prosecutors to cut plea deals in which they drop some charges in exchange for a suspect admitting to breaking other laws.
For Puskaric, the impeachment is a political miscalculation that could blow back on Republicans in ways that are deeply damaging to conservative causes.
"If the Democrats were to take back control and, say, pass gun control or an assault weapons ban, if our district attorneys in the rural part of the state said 'We're not going to enforce it, we're going to become Second Amendment sanctuary counties' — and many of them have said that — this precedent now basically allows the Legislature to impeach" them, Puskaric said.
And if policy disagreements are grounds for impeachment, lawmakers who voted to charge Krasner might someday face the same threat, Puskaric said.
"It's honestly laughable that they're thinking they won't be held to the same standard at some point."
