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.