A College Park resident urged the City Council Tuesday night to call on Congress to impeach President Trump.
Tom Johnson, the founder of Spark Impeachment, a newly formed local political organization, asked the council to vote on a resolution that calls on Congress to begin an impeachment investigation of Trump during its next meeting on March 21.
The commander-in-chief’s “unconstitutional conflicts of interests” and “complete divorce from reality” warrant his removal from office, Johnson said in an interview before the meeting.
The resolution comes from ImpeachDonaldTrumpNow.org, an organization Spark Impeachment works closely with. Spark Impeachment also introduced the resolution to the Montgomery County Council, which has yet to act on the draft.
“[ImpeachDonaldTrumpNow.org] are the same folks that got over 900,000 signatures on their impeachment petition that was delivered to Congress,” Johnson said. While that petition was meant to amass private citizen support, this current resolution looks for cities’ backing.
District 3 Councilman Robert Day expressed interest in hearing more about the issue after the meeting.
“It is something that I’m definitely interested in exploring because what I think [Trump] has done is put himself above the law in some cases,” he said. “He should definitely be held accountable.”
However, Day reiterated the council’s desire “to make sure that we put city issues first.”
“We have talked about this type of issue before,” he said. “There’s some council members who feel that we need to refocus on the issues of the city. I’m not really sure where this is going to end up.”
[Read More: College Park and PG County will uphold sanctuary city policies despite Trump order]
When asked about the potential resolution, several residents declined to speak on the record.
The council made no move to officially address the resolution by the end of the meeting Tuesday.
Spark Impeachment, formed shortly after the election, plans to use the support garnered from the resolution to call on all members of Congress to begin the impeachment process, and has no interest in being partisan, according to the group’s Facebook page. Eighty-five people follow the page currently.
“We are not focused on politics or policy,” the page reads. “We are reaching out to all Americans to decry the corrosion of democracy that this current administration represents.”
So far, the group’s primary actions include holding a rally at the Capitol Building in Washington while Trump gave his Feb. 28 address to the joint session of Congress, and organizing a phone bank to support the “Ides of Trump” on March 15.
The “Ides of Trump” movement aims to send more than 1 million pieces of snail mail that day to Trump, to express discontent with his administration and policies and to break the record for the amount of mail sent on one day to a single person. The current record is 1 million.
Johnson said his organization also rejects the idea that Vice President Pence is “just as bad” as Trump.
“Even though we’re not huge fans of Mike Pence, we think [taking Trump out of power] is the patriotic thing to do,” he said. “We even really actively root for him to be our president immediately because of the unique threats that Donald Trump represents.
“It’s not about party, it’s not about politics,” Johnson added. “It’s about decency and our democracy.”
CORRECTION: Due to a reporting error, a previous version of this article misquoted Tom Johnson. He said the ImpeachDonaldTrumpNow.org petition got more than 900,000 signatures, not 9,000. This story has been updated.
