On Thursday, her very first day in Congress, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) made it clear why she came to Washington.
Speaking to a gathering of fellow liberals, Tlaib described a conversation she had with her son after her election victory.
"And when your son looks at you and says, 'Mama, look, you won. Bullies don’t win,'" she quoted her son as saying.
“You’re right, they don’t," Rashida says she told him. "And we’re gonna go in and impeach the motherfucker!"
Also on Thursday, Tlaib co-authored an op-ed in The Detroit Free Press, titled: "Now is the time to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump."
"President Donald Trump is a direct and serious threat to our country," the op-ed says.
It continues:
We already have overwhelming evidence that the president has committed impeachable offenses, including, just to name a few: obstructing justice; violating the emoluments clause; abusing the pardon power; directing or seeking to direct law enforcement to prosecute political adversaries for improper purposes; advocating illegal violence and undermining equal protection of the laws; ordering the cruel and unconstitutional imprisonment of children and their families at the southern border; and conspiring to illegally influence the 2016 election through a series of hush money payments.
Whether the president was directly involved in a conspiracy with the Russian government to interfere with the 2016 election remains the subject of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. But we do not need to wait on the outcome of that criminal investigation before moving forward now with an inquiry in the U.S. House of Representatives on whether the president has committed impeachable “high crimes and misdemeanors” against the state: abuse of power and abuse of the public trust.
At the end of the op-ed, Tlaib and her co-author wrote:
"This is not just about Donald Trump. This is about all of us. What should we be as a nation? Who should we be as a people?"
Tlaib has made it clear that she and others who agree with her should be the ones to answer those questions -- not the voters who elected Trump.
CNN played a bleeped version of Tlaib's comments Friday morning. The consensus was that she went too far:
Host Alisyn Camerota noted that people listening to her were holding cameras, "so this wasn't like a hot-mic moment."
“And I think that you can hear already that a lot of the freshman class is filled with vim and vigor -- that's my euphemism for something else," Camerota said. She then wondered if such a "style" will be effective.
Camerota's co-host John Berman said he uses swear words himself, "at the appropriate times." "But," he asked contributor David Gregory, "what if this had happened under Obama and a freshman Republican member of Congress on the first day on the job had called Obama a 'mother-f’er', you know, it would be a big deal. It is something worth pointing out.
Absolutely, it's stupid, it's wrong,” Gregory opined. “It creates all kinds of problems for Democrats, for people who go after the crudeness and the crassness of President Trump, and unfortunately those adjectives are warranted, given the way he's expressed himself. It certainly doesn't excuse it on the other side. And this is an indication of the problem that Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leaders have, both stylistically but also substantively.
Gregory concluded that until Robert Mueller finishes his work, "no one is going to know" if there are grounds for impeachment.
Perhaps responding to Tlaib's remark, President Trump tweeted on Friday: "How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps the greatest election of all time, done nothing wrong (no Collusion with Russia, it was the Dems that Colluded), had the most successful first two years of any president, and is the most popular Republican in party history 93%?"