Barabak: What voters in McCarthy’s district think about impeachment effort
VISALIA — Julian Perea doesn’t hate Joe Biden. If anything, he feels bad for him, given his age and what Perea regards as the president’s severe mental and physical impairment.
“The guy is out of it,” Perea said.
Even so, the retired Fresno police officer is glad the House of Representatives — led by his congressman, Speaker Kevin McCarthy — has taken the first step toward impeaching the president.
“We as conservatives need to fight back,” said Perea, who served more than three decades in the Army and sprinkled his views with several references to war and warfare. “You have to keep the enemy off balance at all times.”
When McCarthy announced last week the start of a formal inquiry into Biden’s impeachment, the Bakersfield Republican was seeking to bolster his wobbly speakership and avoid a government shutdown by mollifying the restive torch-and-pitchfork wing of the House GOP.
It hasn’t worked, as McCarthy continues to teeter and Republicans lurch toward a lights-out deadline at the end of September.
But the move plainly suits many of the voters McCarthy represents in California’s oil-and-agricultural heartland — a broad swath of the state’s midsection and the ruddiest of red turf — which backed President Trump’s reelection by a landslide. McCarthy was sent to Washington with 67% support.
“I think it’s a great idea,” said Claudia Warkentin of Biden’s impeachment.
The 43-year-old political independent lives in Clovis, a Fresno suburb, and works in the waste-management industry. She voted for Trump in 2020 and may back him again in 2024.
Biden has “made a mockery of our country,” Warkentin said, pointing to the frailties she sees in the 80-year-old president. Impeachment “should have happened a long time ago.”
That rough consensus isn’t terribly surprising. After all, McCarthy represents a region speckled with road signs condemning “woke politics,” Gov. Gavin Newsom (“Stop wasting our dam water!”) and McCarthy’s predecessor as speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi.
What’s striking is how little Biden’s alleged, unproven corruption has to do with pro-impeachment sentiments.
His son Hunter, the subject of a special counsel investigation, may have shamelessly grubbed for money by trading on the family name. Many consider him ripe for criminal prosecution.
But the case that critics make against the president goes well beyond that — and has little to do with the inquiry underway in Congress.
It’s driven in good part by anger and fear: about inflation, soaring gas prices, green energy, crime, homelessness, policy toward Israel, all of it undergirding a sense the country is headed irretrievably in …
Source:: East Bay – Entertainment
