Over the course of her first nine months in Congress, she said so over and over. She was there to serve her constituents near Richmond, Va., who wanted safe streets and health care and good-paying jobs. As her colleagues ranted about Russia and racism, she kept saying she was focused elsewhere–until Donald Trump did something she felt she couldn’t ignore.
Spanberger, a former CIA officer, was elected as a Democrat last November to represent a House district that went for Trump by a 7-point margin in 2016. Supporting impeachment could hurt her image as a moderate more focused on getting things done than on partisan crusades, and put her re-election at risk. But on Sept. 23, she joined other centrist colleagues and, for the first time, endorsed impeachment proceedings after a whistle-blower reportedly complained that the President had pressured a foreign leader to investigate one of Trump’s top rivals in the 2020 election. “It wasn’t that my mind was changed, it’s that we were presented with new information,” Spanberger told TIME as she cut across the Capitol lawn the next day.
View the complete September 26 article by Molly Ball on the Time website here.