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.
