'They ... don't want to face me,' Biden says after Ernst suggests he could be impeached

Stephen Gruber-Miller | Des Moines Register

Show Caption Hide Caption Joe Biden responds to impeachment comments made by Joni Ernst Former Vice President Joe Biden responds to comments Joni Ernst made about impeaching Biden if he became president.

After Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, suggested Sunday that Republicans could move to impeach former Vice President Joe Biden over Ukraine if he were elected president, Biden said her comments show President Donald Trump and his allies are scared of him.

Ernst, an Iowa Republican, gave an interview to Bloomberg News on Sunday where she suggested House Democrats' impeachment of Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress has lowered the bar for impeaching a president.

"I think this door of impeachable whatever has been opened," Ernst told Bloomberg News in the interview. "Joe Biden should be very careful what he’s asking for because, you know, we can have a situation where if it should ever be President Biden, that immediately, people, right the day after he would be elected would be saying, ‘Well, we’re going to impeach him.'"

Brook Ramlet, a senior adviser to Ernst, said Sunday that Ernst was making a hypothetical point and that she never said she thinks Biden should be impeached.

"She said that because of how House Democrats have lowered the standards of impeachment, if Biden wins, there could be people calling for it," Ramlet said in an email.

In an interview Sunday with the Des Moines Register, Biden said Ernst's comments and Trump's decision to ask Ukraine to investigate his actions overseeing foreign policy in that country show that the president is afraid of running against him.

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"She just reinforces everything that was the reason why the president was being impeached: They very much don’t want to face me obviously," Biden told the Register. "I’ve never seen a sitting president and his allies this frightened about who may be the nominee."

Biden said he has never met Ernst and only knows her by her reputation and what she has said about him, but the two have been sparring all week.

Biden received some of his loudest applause this week when he told Iowans that they can "ruin Joni Ernst's night" by caucusing for him Monday, after she questioned whether Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate might damage Biden in the caucuses because Trump's lawyers sought, without evidence, to paint him as corrupt.

"Iowa caucuses are this next Monday evening, and I’m really interested to see how this discussion today informs and influences the Iowa caucus voters," Ernst said last week. "Those Democratic caucusgoers, will they be supporting Vice President Biden at this point?"

Biden told the Register on Sunday he doesn't believe that comments like Ernst's will stop him from carrying out his promise to bring the country together and work with Republicans if he's elected.

"There is an appetite, but not the Joni Ernsts of the world," he said. "There’s some that are just beyond the pale, but I think there are at least a dozen Republicans who know we have to do something about health care, at least a dozen of them know we have to do something about keeping prescription drug prices down, know we have to do something about increasing access to education and so on."

He repeated the argument that he has made on the campaign trail that if he won the nomination he could help elect Democrats to the Senate and other down-ballot races in places such as Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

"With a little bit of luck, one of the reasons why I think that in addition to being able to defeat President Trump — and he’s demonstrated that he thinks so too — is that I think I can help candidates running in Iowa for the Senate," he said.

Stephen Gruber-Miller covers the Iowa Statehouse and politics for the Des Moines Register. He can be reached by email at sgrubermil@registermedia.com or by phone at 515-284-8169. Follow him on Twitter at @sgrubermiller.