A thought occurs to me now that impeachment of the president has returned to the arena.
Just suppose the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives is actually is so blindly stupid that it actually impeaches President Obama for exercising his constitutional right of executive authority and tinkers with immigration reform.
Now, let us now suppose that the Republican-run U.S. Senate gets articles of impeachment and puts the president on bleeping trial for it.
The next Senate is going to have a maximum of 54 GOP members, depending on the outcome of the runoff race in Louisiana set for December. It takes 67 votes to convict a president of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and remove him from office.
Does anyone in their right mind think Republicans are going to persuade 13 Democratic senators to engage in this ridiculous charade?
The thought then boils down to this: The impeachment talk, should it ever come to pass, is meant to put an asterisk next to Barack Obama’s name. The members of Congress who detest him and the policies that got him elected twice to the presidency simply want the word “impeached” next to his name. They want his obituary, when it is finally written, to contain the “I-word.” They want his presidency scarred for life with the notion that the House of Representatives trumped up a phony “crime” upon which to impeach the 44th president of the United States.
Well, the last time the GOP tried that — in 1998 against Bill Clinton — it fell flat on its face. President Clinton walked out of the White House in January 2001 with his standing intact and he has emerged as arguably the nation’s premier political leader.
That won’t matter to the current crop of congressional “leaders” who are insisting that Barack Obama keep his mitts off any executive orders regarding immigration.
House Speaker John Boehner declared not long ago that impeachment won’t happen while he’s the Man of the House. Yet his GOP caucus has been strengthened and made even more strident in the wake of the 2014 mid-term election.
We’ll get to see how much clout he can wield if the nimrod wing of his party starts getting a bit too feisty.