Beaufort County Commissioners are asking the 116^th Congress of the United States of America to stop the impeachment proceedings of President Donald Trump.

At Monday’s regularly scheduled meeting, commissioners voted to pass a resolution calling for the suspension of impeachment. The vote was along party lines, with Republicans Stan Deatherage, Jerry Evans, John Rebholz, Hood Richardson and Frankie Waters voting for the resolution and Democrats Ed Booth and Jerry Langley voting against.

The resolution was presented jointly by Deatherage and Beaufort County resident Ray Leary, with Leary reading the resolution in its entirety to the board before the vote. The resolution points out that while commissioners support the Constitutional provisions calling for a president to be impeached for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” that president must be unquestionably guilty of those crimes; and that only four presidents have every been subjected to an impeachment inquiry and only two (Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton) have been impeached. The resolution refers to the current proceedings as a “faux impeachment inquiry” being used to “remove a popular political foe that these Democratic Socialists, in control of the House in the 116^th Congress, despise and are publicly sworn to act as the organized ‘resistance’ to Mr. Trump’s active endeavor to better govern the People of these United States,” and calls for a dismissal or a fair trial by the Senate should impeachment move forward.

While the resolution passed 5-2, Waters requested a change in phrasing from “Therefore, be it resolved, the Beaufort County Commissioners do humbly beg the House of Representatives’ leadership of the 116^th Congress to suspend the possible impeachment of President Donald J. Trump…” to “ask the House of Representatives.”

“I have no problems with the resolution. The only thing is in the last paragraph I would recommend that we take the word ‘humbly beg’ and we change that to ‘ask.’ I don’t like the idea of begging for anything,” Waters said.