With the November midterm elections just four months away, Northern Virginia Rep. Don Beyer (D-8) is considering the implications of a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives.
In his office at the Longworth House Office Building, Beyer told ALXnow in an interview that President Donald Trump deserves to be impeached a third time, but not as a messaging exercise that will result in an acquittal from a divided Senate. He also said that no matter the outcome of the November midterms that the country will still have two years left of an administration that operates under the unitary executive theory of the presidency.
“He certainly has done enough stuff to deserve impeachment,” Beyer said of Trump. “I think we’ll wait. First, let’s see if we take back the House and take back the Senate. Even then, I think we’re going to have to balance whether it’s worth the time and effort and energy and money to impeach him and send it to the Senate, where there’s no way it would actually be convicted.”
Beyer is running for a seventh term against four local candidates in the Democratic primary on Aug. 4. He faces former Alexandria City Council Member Mo Seifeldein, fired State Department worker Michael Duffin, veteran and former CIA officer Adam Dunigan and military family advocate Lorena Bruner. The winner of the primary will face Republican Tony Sabio, a veteran and former Secret Service officer.
The 76-year-old Congressman says he’s in the prime of his life, and plans to keep working at what he’s called the best job he’s ever had. He also says that his constituents are worried about housing affordability, artificial intelligence disrupting job markets and the country’s standing in the world.
A former lieutenant governor who also served as the Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein during the Obama administration, Beyer was first elected to Congress in 2014. Since then, he’s won reelection by a significant margin and, in his current race, has gained endorsements for reelection from U.S. Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, Alexandria Mayor Alyia Gaskins and a number of current and former Alexandria and Arlington officials.
ALXnow: You’re also running for office again. How many more of these campaigns have you got left in you?
Beyer: I don’t know, but right now I still feel very young, very strong. In my head, I still think I’m 37 and my health is great. I do feel I’m in prime health, but even more importantly is that there’s a lot of important things I want to get done, and we have a rich agenda of things that will make a big difference in people’s lives. It’s very difficult to get much of it done right now in the minority, but I’m hoping that we will be a majority in 19 weeks and maybe have a chance to be a majority in the Senate.
ALXnow: What are the top concerns you’re hearing from constituents right now?
Beyer: It’s all over the place. Artificial intelligence is coming up more and more often now, and in a variety of ways. Number one is data centers as a concern because electric bills have soared for most people, and it’s not unfair to blame the data centers, because 20% of American electricity right now is being absorbed by data centers, so that’s a big deal, and we have a majority of the world’s data centers in Northern Virginia powered by Dominion [Energy]. So if you’re in Alexandria, you’re powered by Dominion, and it’s a big deal.
A second thing is housing affordability. It’s very expensive to live in Alexandria, and … then although the biggest concern by far is … the concern about what the current administration has done to our reputation in the world and our reputation at home, the fears about interference in elections, the fears about the arch and the reflecting pool and the ballroom, all the concern about tariffs.
ALXnow: How can Congress better insulate federal workers from political purges and the chaos of sudden administrative shifts?
Beyer: This is the first president of my lifetime that’s ever acted like this. We never had the DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] before, we’ve never had Elon Musk parachute in with his DOGE kids. What we tried to do during the Biden administration was to make sure that “Schedule F” (The administration’s plan to strip civil service protections) … doesn’t happen. We will do that again next year. President Trump won’t sign it, but someday we’ll get a Democratic president who will sign that legislation.
ALXnow: You voted to impeach this president two times. Should he be impeached again?
Beyer: He certainly has done enough stuff to deserve impeachment. I think we’ll wait. First, let’s see if we take back the House and take back the Senate. Even then, I think we’re going to have to balance whether it’s worth the time and effort and energy and money to impeach him and send it to the Senate, where there’s no way it would actually be convicted.
Even with both houses, you have to get 67 votes (two-thirds) in the Senate. We’re never going to get that. I mean, we’d have to run the table to get a simple majority in the Senate. There will be people there, very concerned people in the constituency I represent, who [say] we should impeach him. But we impeached him twice and he still got reelected. They impeached Bill Clinton and he would have won a third time easily if that had been constitutional, so I just want to make sure that if we’re going to do that, that it’s more than just a messaging exercise.
ALXnow: It would break historic precedent if Democrats don’t take control of the House. The last time there was four full years of a congressional supermajority was 1937 to 1941.
Beyer: History is on our side, but we still have to do the work. We need good candidates, they need to be well funded. They need to run great campaigns, and always there is worry about what Trump and Musk will try to do to skew the results.
ALXnow: A lot of people are worried about the appearance of ICE and federal agents showing up at polling places.
Beyer: I’m not particularly worried about Virginia. Virginia’s so decentralized, none of our voting machines are hooked up to the internet, for example. We have paper ballots. I think ours have always been very fair, Democrat and Republican, no matter who we elect, but there are anxieties about that.
However … 19 weeks to go, it looks pretty good for us taking back the House and possible for us to take back the Senate, but then we also have to realize we still have a Donald Trump as president, and so we’re not just going to be suddenly able to change the whole world, especially with the unitary theory of the presidency, which they’re very big on, which is the president can do anything he wants.
ALXnow: Bearing that in mind, what does a lame duck Trump presidency look like to you?
Beyer: There are people at the Cato Institute who love divided government. They point out that in divided government we never start wars and we never raise taxes. However, Donald Trump did a pretty good job of starting a major war with Iran without congressional approval and spent a trillion dollars.
ALXnow: Is the tide turning from congressional Republicans with passage of the War Powers Act?
Beyer: Yeah, and it’ll turn even more after this election, because many Republicans who would disagree with President Trump on a number of issues can’t right now, [they’re] afraid to, for fear that he’ll [destroy their careers]. You see that with Bill Cassidy and Thomas Massie and many others, Nancy Mace.
But that becomes less problematic when he’s a lame duck. Also, all spending bills start in the House, and if we control the House, we will have a much better handle on spending. However, that’s not absolute, because you have impoundment, where we have all kinds of money that’s been authorized and appropriated that he just doesn’t spend. He has also been very clever at moving money appropriated for one thing, to some other purpose.
ALXnow: You introduced a bill to block President Trump’s proposed triumphal arch between the Memorial Bridge and Arlington National Cemetery. Is this an effective deterrent against construction of the arch?
Beyer: No. This bill is our best faith effort to let the people of America know that we’re fighting to stop this order. The Commemorative Works Act (banning development on federal land without Congressional approval) should be enough, and I’m hoping that the courts will decide that the Commemorative Works Act prohibits the president from doing this, and as you know we have the veterans groups that are suing under the Commemorative Works Act to stop the arch.
ALXnow: You’re also pursuing a degree in machine learning from GMU. How’s it going?
Beyer: It’s going well, though. I was up till midnight last night doing homework.
ALXnow: How do you have time to do this? What does school look like for you?
Beyer: It keeps me really busy. My book reading has fallen in half because I just don’t have time to read, but I really enjoy it. It’s fun and interesting. I’m in the summer session right now, so it’s a graduate statistics course, and then I’ll move on to computer science. The first three years I was just taking undergraduate courses that I needed to qualify for the graduate program, because I’d never take a computer science course, and my math courses were from Gonzaga in the 1960s.
ALXnow: What kind of guardrails do we need in society against artificial intelligence?
Beyer: We need another hour. I co-chair the AI caucus, and I have the bills, literally called the Guardrails Act, and the Guardrails Act is specifically to offset Donald Trump’s moratorium on state and local governments being able to do AI.
ALXnow: Last year you hiked the Appalachian Trail. Any special plans this summer?
Beyer: I only have three days to hike. It’s a negotiation with my wife, because she worries terribly when I go off to the mountains. I always assure her nothing bad has ever happened, but I’m going to go back and hike three days just before Labor Day in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. There are 48, 4000-foot-plus peaks in New Hampshire, led by Mount Washington, which is the coldest place on earth. I’ve already climbed 16 of them, and so it’s sort of a big deal in the Appalachian Mountain Club to hike all 48.
