Republicans are boosting the idea of impeaching President Obama because they’ve given up on public policy.
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If it’s August in Washington, it’s silly season. Don’t ask me why this is, maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s the humidity, maybe it’s just even reporters and politicians need to be able to goof around like everyone. Nobody really knows why it happens, but every year it really seems to come out around now.
The big new theme in Washington is kicking around the idea of impeaching the president for no particular reason. Conservative activists have been talking about this since 2009 to at least some degree. And considering the GOP’s behavior the last time they had to deal with a Democratic President, impeachment isn’t exactly a new idea here.
This is of course a very silly idea. Even if the House of Representatives could must a majority to impeach President Obama, nobody thinks 20 odd Democrats would jump ship and vote to convict the president in the resulting trial in the Senate where you need 67 senators to actually remove someone from office. Furthermore it’s not even clear what “high crimes and misdemeanors” President Obama has done to justify removal from office. The reality is that most of the “scandals” and ideas conservatives cite fall into pretty normal presidential behavior, and some scandals, like the IRS “scandal”, were basically made up out of whole cloth. So yeah President Obama said “if you like your plan you can keep it” but Reagan said “we did not trade weapons for hostages” and I remember a lot from 2002 and 2003 about the need to “disarm Iraq.” All of which means that impeachment will probably never happen.
So what’s going on here? Aside from August goofiness I personally suspect this is just another symptom of our old friend the post policy nature of the current GOP. What do I mean by post policy? Think of it this way, the current Republican Party isn’t really oriented around policy disputes, but instead around a game of trying to prove to each who’s the real True Conservative and who is just another RINO sell out. And so you get a party that has now promised for five years(!) to both repeal and replace Obamacare but can’t bother to ever sit down and write a replace bill, let alone even outline basic principles of an alternative to our health care system other than the vaguest possible platitudes about “the market” or “freedom of choice.”
Or just take Republican critiques of Obama’s foreign policy. There’s a lot of things you could say about the Benghazi tragedy. You could say that it proves America shouldn’t get involved in foreign military adventures, or you could say that America should have invaded Libya with overwhelming military force and occupied it for nine years, or you could say that diplomats should be kept locked in giant bunkers and almost never interact with the population of the country they are in (this is our current policy in many ways). But that’s not what Republicans said; instead they rolled out thrown together conspiracy theories that fell apart after the most basic inspection. Or they take widely disparate events and link them together with the vague of possible analysis about how Obama needs to be “tough.” How should he be tough? Bomb more countries? Scream at foreign leaders? Re-invade Iraq?
The answer is something like this, “Well we aren’t going to say but suffice to say he should be tough.”
Perhaps Republicans will eventually elect a president and everyone will fall in line. Perhaps another presidential election defeat, or maybe two, will snap them out of it. Or perhaps the radicals win, and the Louis Gohmerts and Ted Cruzes are swallowed by another group of even more nonsensical radicals until every sensible person has been chased from the party, giving the Democrats a real majority.
You want Obama out of office before January 2017? Be carfeul what you wish for. Two words: President Biden. “President Palin” and “President Ryan” were enough to scare the crap out of me, and I know “President Edwards” made you shudder, so I’m guessing “President Biden” would be enough to give you pause. In fact, if Biden served less than two years as President, he would still be eligible for two full terms. Unlikely, but constitutionally possible. In any event, if La Rouche supporters want charges of impeachment drawn up, they will need to get all of their party’s members… Read more »
At this point, I would actually encourage people to talk about impeachment. At least impeachment is a legal, Constitutional process which Congress has a full legal right to discuss. It’s working within the system.
I’ll take calls for impeachment any day of the week instead of shooting abortion doctors, waving guns at little league games, shutting down bridge traffic because of a temper tantrum, imprisoning citizens without trial, or bombing people going to a wedding.
Why discuss it? It’s clear that the President hasn’t committed a high crime or misdemeanor, so discussing it seems rather silly. Until somebody has accusations that he’s committed a high crime or misdemeanor, there shouldn’t be any discussion of impeachment.
I’d agree that the Democrats are talking about this and raising money from it too. And rightly so! Raising money is a big part of what political party units do. The big point is that if the GOP was focused on policy, the nutty voices calling for impeachment or complaining about “the war on white people” wouldn’t dominate discourse around the GOP. There were lots of nutty things said about Bush, but they rarely were the main things coming out the Democratic Party back then.
John, how old are you? Maybe too young to know or have experienced / observed. Republican party has been the headline news for main stream media for as long as I can remember. Headline news = blasting president at every turn. The only reprieve occurred was when 9/11 hit. “!I’d agree that the Democrats are talking about this and raising money from it too. And rightly so!” So it’s okay to raise money based on a “known” lie? Doesn’t that say something about the integrity of the party? What bothers me is that you justify it and approve of it,… Read more »
About that Charlie Chaplain mustache: Anyone who equates Obama with Hitler has no real understanding of history. No matter how awful you think Obama is, do you honestly think he’s equivalent to Hitler? Seriously? No matter how terrible you may think Obama is, you have to know that there will likely be a future president who is worse. If you call Obama Hitler, then you’ve painted yourself into a corner. If the next Democratic president is even worse, then what are you going to do? You’d be hard-pressed to find another analogy worse than Hitler. However, in some ways it’s… Read more »
Actually, it’s the dems talking it up to gin up their base and get more money from the chumps.
John is a retired political operative. Or maybe he’s not retired. He already knows this. He hopes we don’t.
Richard, I have yet read an article in this section that hasn’t been accurately refuted. It does though give us the opportunity to bring light to the truth. So we’re kinda educating people who read this stuff. John, I have suggestions for some articles if you care to move away from the main stream … Here are some ideas for future articles … no charge – Obama ratings going down – ISIS forcing religious minority to die of thirst – New crimes created since 2008 – 400 of them – New poll showing that Americans don’t really back Israel /… Read more »
And John, do your party a favor, quit enabling them, hold them accountable, I do.
I wish people knew what “impeachment” actually means. It just means Congress putting the President on trial for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It doesn’t mean he’s removed from office, though it could mean that. Only two Presidents have ever been impeached, and in both cases they remained in office anyway. To impeach, you have to have criminal charges of some kind brought against a sitting President, not just a list of bad things that have happened. “Doing a terrible job” is not an impeachable offense. [Maybe it should be, but that would require a constitutional amendment.] If those are the… Read more »
[Sorry, that earlier message was a typing mistake. I don’t have that Hotmail account, so please do not send hate mail (or fan mail!) to that address.] I wish people knew what “impeachment” actually means. It just means Congress putting the President on trial for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It doesn’t mean he’s removed from office, though it could mean that. Only two Presidents have ever been impeached, and in both cases they remained in office anyway. To impeach, you have to have criminal charges of some kind brought against a sitting President, not just a list of bad things… Read more »
That’s not correct, it’s not just crimes, it’s high crimes and misdemeanors. That’s things like ceding a major military base to the enemy or secretly leaking war plans to the enemy. Offering to veto bills for money would also qualify.
Basically it’s things which only the President can do because only the President has the power to break those laws. So, sellling his signature to legislation would, perjuring himself wouldn’t.
John, you truly are having a conversation everyone else is having …The scoreboard so far in July: Fox News has 95 mentions of impeachment, and MSNBC 448. That works out to about 2.7 mentions per hour of original programming on MSNBC, or once every 22 minutes. (This data is as of late Tuesday afternoon.)
MSNBC hasn’t become quite as obsessed with impeachment as CNN was with Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, but it may be getting there. Impeachment mentions on MSNBC increased sixfold from May to July. Overall, since Jan. 1, MSNBC has mentioned impeachment 905 times to Fox News’s 213.
You really need to open your mind and quit being main stream medias sheeple. “House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that Republicans have no plans to impeach President Obama, and that all the impeachment talk was driven by Democrats hoping to stir up their base. Boehner’s statement isn’t literally true: There have been mentions of impeachment around the edges of the GOP and by some Republican members of Congress. But on the whole, Democrats are spending a lot more time talking about impeachment than Republicans. Are “some” talking about it? Yup, but as a whole, no. But that’s not to… Read more »
When has a clear lack of legal standing to impeach stopped the GOP? They impeached the last Democractic President we had, despite a complete lack of any high crime or misdemeanor being committed.