Kentucky Democrat says 'a lot of us' think Trump has 'committed impeachable offences'

'But that doesn’t mean we’re going to spend any time talking about it,' the Representative adds

Many Democrats believe President Donald Trump has committed acts worthy of impeachment, Representative John Yarmuth has claimed.

The Democratic legislator, who has represented the conservative state of Kentucky for 10 years, told MSNBC’s Katy Tur that there are “a lot of us, myself included, who believe that Donald Trump has committed impeachable offences”.

Mr Yarmuth pointed specifically to an instance in which Mr Trump threatened to revoke the licenses of TV networks he deemed “partisan” and “distorted”.

“To me that's an abuse of power that rises to an impeachable offence,” Mr Yarmuth said, “but that doesn’t mean we’re going to spend any time talking about it.”

Indeed, most Democrats have shied away from publicly discussing the prospect of impeachment. The vast majority of Democratic Representatives voted to table, or kill, articles of impeachment that were brought to the House floor earlier this month.

Mr Yarmuth, who co-sponsored separate articles of impeachment in November, was among those who voted the bill down.

“It would just be a waste of time,” Mr Yarmuth said of the impeachment effort on Wednesday. "We don’t have the power to do it and we don't have the votes to do it, so we'll never get an impeachment resolution to the floor.”

Impeaching the President requires a majority vote in the House and a two-thirds vote in the Senate.

Mr Yarmuth suggested that impeachment could be a possibility if Democrats regained the majority in 2018, but said it should not be the platform on which Democratic candidates run.

“We should be running on how we makes lives better for the American people,” he said.

The sentiment echoes that of the Democratic leadership, who have urged legislators to focus on other concerns. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer both discouraged Democrats from supporting this month’s impeachment vote, saying that "now is not the time to consider articles of impeachment".

“Congress faces a vast set of urgent, overdue priorities for the American people," the leaders said in a joint statement. "Democrats are firmly focused on taking real, effective steps to improve the lives of hard-working Americans and defeating Republicans’ cruel barrage of attacks on the middle class."

Recent polling shows more voters now support impeaching Mr Trump than support his re-election. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found 41 per cent of Americans want to see Mr Trump impeached, while only 36 per cent said they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for him in 2020.