Let’s go back a little bit. On the same day that SCOTUS held ACA to be constitutional, the House voted to hold AG Eric Holder in contempt which Holder swore to fight (and he and the House are still fighting two years later). While rare, there is precedent for impeaching a cabinet member and to me this would send a very strong anti-Obama message. I’m shocked the House didn’t impeach him in 2012 let alone letting it go on for two years.
Now Crybaby Boehner wants to sue Obama (on behalf of the House) for exceeding his constitutional authority. Beside the standing issue which is hard to know a priori how the courts will rule (I think there is ample evidence that since Congress was not directly affected and so have no standing), does anyone really thing the judicial branch won’t punt and say 1) it’s a political question and/or 2) if Congress thinks Obama violated the law - well that’s why there is an impeachment process.
So why doesn’t the House want to impeach Holder or Obama? I know that the Dems have a majority (and conviction needs 2/3 of the Senators) but that didn’t stop them from impeaching Clinton (question: did the Pubs learn from that experience?) but even so, when has anyone accused the House Republicans of acting rationally, and impeaching Holder would draw the current battle to a head. As for impeaching Obama, that is crazy-ass but is might actually be less crazy than the current lawsuit.
I think a bunch of them would love nothing more, but the shrinking number of relatively sane Republicans (including Boehner) understand it would be a massive political loser for them.
Politics. IMO, the best approach to dealing with executive branch lawlessness is simply to point it out and let the people judge. If the GOP wins both chambers in 2014, they can start doing targeted defunding of the means the President uses to break the law, or retaliate against him not enforcing law in one area by defunding law he cares about in another. Don’t want to enforce immigration laws? THe IRS loses a billion for implementing ACA.
Since when do the tea party care about what effect their behavior will have on election cycles down the road? They run on not caring about that. The Tea party has cost the GOP several senate seats since 2010, so I don’t agree with the idea that they aren’t doing it because it is a political loser. The tea party is going to take a short term gain for a long term loss, they’ve done it in the past in order to uphold their principles.
I assume the sane (however you define that word) republicans are holding them back.
Part of it may be that they just don’t have any grounds that would hold up in an impeachment yet. Maybe the vet scandal will, but so far its all been fluff.
Yeah, I don’t think impeachment should be done unless you can prove a real crime. the President is skating the line with his executive actions, but not going over it. What they need is for him to be caught in a corrupt act, or an appointed official(and then impeach that official if the President won’t fire him or her), or catch the President actively violating a law or refusing to enforce a duly enacted law where he can’t claim prosecutorial discretion or limited resources.
Ending deportation of non-criminal aliens completely on his own would be a clear case of refusing to execute the law. But I doubt he’ll do that.
But then again, who cares? The GOP is favored to win the next election handily(although Senate control is 50-50). Why mess up a good thing? Even if the GOP doesn’t take the Senate, the President is pretty much done. He’s not proposing anything new, as much as he likes to promise executive action he can’t do much on that front without breaking the law. The only thing that can save his Presidency is for the GOP to do something stupid that would hand Democrats the House back. Impeachment could conceivably do that. The government shutdown would have on its own, except the REpublicans were saved by a wave of stupidity emanating from the depths of the administration.
They don’t even need to say anything. The continuous news of government incompetence and the President’s excuses(I can’t be expected to run something this big!) makes Reagan’s old argument without them having to say a word. Just let the media keep digging for administration incompetence and let the President keep making excuses that they scoff at.
Even the preceding one - several of the GOP-only reps who went ahead and did it, in a lame-duck session with no functioning Speaker, had already been voted out of office for promising to do it.
Real crimes, hardly any. But it’s worth remembering that it’s up to the House and 2/3 of the Senate to decide what is impeachable and convictable. If the numbers were there, they could impeach him and remove him for tying his shoes the wrong way. The constitution doesn’t require an actual crime, but specified “high crimes and misdemeanors,” a phrase that is not formally defined.
(There’s even debate whether this means “High crimes, and also misdemeanors,” or “High crimes and High Misdemeanors.” During the Watergate era, the phrase “High Misdemeanors” had a brief popularity.)
(Was it used much during the Clinton impeachment?)
Both of these. Years of ‘Obama is a tyrant’ rhetoric have kept the base excited and the donations flowing, but Republican leadership understands they have no case, no way to win, and that the reaction from the rest of the country would be strongly negative. The lawsuit against Obama is essentially a compromise on the impeachment issue. Once again Boehner has to give the base something and this is what he’s come up with.
Oh, and the way I remember it, Holder is expected to step down this year anyway. So he’s hardly worth impeaching.
I would love it of they went for impeachment, because it’d be a hoot to watch it fail.
But realistically, things are in a good place for them. They have an easy enemy, and have built an ever-giving stream of faux scandals that sell books and get ratings. The base keeps fired up, nobody has to actually show the leadership (or brainpower) that one needs to address real issues, and a stable of media personalities has an easy way to make money off half-assed screeds.
A successful impeachment would kill the goose that laid the golden egg. It’s kind of like how the Daily Show lost some steam without GW, except horrifyingly realer.
Exactly. It’s easy to accuse somebody of dozen of crimes. But if you actually charge somebody with a crime, you have to provide proof. The Republicans in Congress know they can’t back up the things they’re saying.
If a President was genuinely not enforcing any laws he would have to be impeached as a practical matter. We’re not at all in such a situation, but I’d be little concerned if it was a violation of some part of the U.S. Code or not, that’d basically be dereliction of duty. Imagine a scenario where the President orders all the FBI Agents to stay home until further notice, for example, along with all the U.S. Border Patrol Agents, releases all persons detained pending a deportation hearing, releases all persons currently facing Federal criminal charges etc.
I do imagine there would be some crimes this would make a President technically guilty of in any case, or at the very least I suspect in such an extreme/ludicrous scenario at some point a court actually would issue an order that the President start doing their constitutional responsibility. I mean Marbury v. Madison didn’t do it, because it found the underlying law unconstitutional, but Marshall did not that Secretary of State Madison’s refusal to do his job was a remediable thing. Marshall’s argument was that the 1789 law that extended writs of mandamus to the SCOTUS’s original jurisdiction was unconstitutional because the original jurisdiction of the SCOTUS was/is set by Article III of the constitution and cannot be altered by statute (either expanded or contracted.)