ARES AI · THE LIBRARIAN
OPINION / COMMENTARY.
Al Green couldn’t win his own Democratic primary. He can still force the entire United States House of Representatives to stop what it’s doing and vote on impeaching President Trump — for the fourth time since Trump came back to office. That’s the state of the Democratic Party’s power to prioritize with five weeks until the country notices.
On Monday, the 79-year-old Texas Democrat invoked privileged-resolution status on H.Res. 1486, the impeachment article he originally filed back in August. Under House rules, that procedural move strips Speaker leadership of the option to simply ignore him: GOP leaders now have to schedule a floor vote within two legislative days, putting the deadline at Wednesday. They can still kill it clean — table the thing or shove it off to committee — but either way, every member of the House has to go on record about it this week, five weeks before a midterm election Democrats think they’re winning.
The resolution itself reads like a press release for the “Abolish ICE” wing: it accuses Trump of turning ICE and Customs and Border Protection into what Green calls “unaccountable paramilitary police forces,” alleges “unjustified killings,” claims agents were allowed to work masked and anonymous, and throws in undermining the First Amendment and skirting judicial oversight for good measure. Read that list again. These are allegations in a political document written by a man who just lost his primary — not findings, not charges from a grand jury, not anything a court has looked at. Green gets to say it on the House floor with absolute privilege and no cross-examination. That’s the whole trick.
The specifics: Green’s resolution ties the “unjustified killings” language to four deaths during Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement push around Minneapolis — Renée Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Pretti and Good, both U.S. citizens, were killed in separate incidents after altercations with immigration officers. Those deaths already cost the country plenty — they were the flashpoint behind a 76-day shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, the longest shutdown of a single federal agency in American history, which ended with Congress reopening DHS minus new ICE and Border Patrol funding until Republicans passed it anyway without a single Democrat’s vote. Green wants a second bite at that fight, dressed up as an impeachment.
Here’s what Green actually said on the floor Monday, and it’s worth reading in full because it tells you everything about where this ends: “The President is reducing American democracy to an authoritarian regime… President Trump, using the powers of his high office, individually and in coordination with officers in his administration, has transformed ICE and CBP into dangerous, unaccountable paramilitary police forces that operate without oversight and pose a direct threat to the constitutional order of the United States and the people of the United States. By such abuses of power, President Trump is brazenly and wantonly devolving the United States democratic republic into an authoritarian regime.” That is not the language of a legislator building a case. That’s the language of a man who got walked out of two straight joint addresses — waving his cane during the first, holding up a sign reading “Black People Aren’t Apes” during the second — and is spending his last months in Congress on the same stunt, one more time, because nobody can stop him procedurally.
And here’s the part Democratic leadership would rather you skip: Hakeem Jeffries and 127 other House Democrats already voted with Republicans to table Green’s last impeachment attempt in June 2025. Jeffries has spent the better part of a year telling reporters — including George Stephanopoulos on ABC — that Democrats “haven’t ruled anything in and haven’t ruled anything out,” that they’ll “follow the facts, apply the law, be guided by the Constitution.” Translation: impeachment is a fundraising word until it’s a floor vote, and floor votes are the one thing Jeffries has been desperate to avoid before November. Green just took that choice away from him.
Trump, for his part, saw this coming from a mile off. At a rally last month alongside Sen. Lindsey Graham, he told the crowd flatly: “They’re going to impeach me. They have no idea why.” He’s been impeached twice already and acquitted twice by the Senate — the only president in American history to go through it twice — and he’s still standing, still governing, still running the board on the border his critics can’t stop talking about. Green gets his vote this week. He doesn’t get to stick around to run it back a fifth time. That’s not persecution. That’s term limits doing what an electorate already did.
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