Obama Impeachment Mania Continues to Deny Reality

My final consultation on Friday was with Richard Putzenkopf, a senior member of US Representative Jack Kingston’s staff.
“These are great times for the Republican Party, Tom,” he observed as he sprawled on the couch in my office, threw his attaché case on the coffee table and fetched a Microsoft Surface tablet from within. After perusing it briefly, he looked up at me and grinned. “Impeachment, Tom. What do you think?”
“Impeach whom?” I replied. “Obama?”
“Who else?” Putzenkopf chuckled.
“The Constitution,” I reminded him, “specifies that the President may be impeached only for ‘treason, bribery, high crimes and misdemeanors.’ Never in the history of the United States of America, has anyone seriously accused an incumbent President of either treason or bribery. That leaves us with ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’ That’s all that has ever been levied against an American President. Not even Andrew Johnson was accused of anything else. Impeachment proceedings against President Nixon were initiated because of his involvement in the burglary of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters and his subsequent acts of perjury and obstruction of justice trying to cover up what happened. President Clinton was actually impeached by the House of Representatives on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice resulting from him trying to cover up his Oval Office hanky-panky with a twenty-something White House intern. But as far as I can tell, Barack Obama hasn’t ordered any B-and-E jobs, or had sex with anyone but his wife, much less tell lies under oath or order underlings to do illegal things to hinder the due course of justice. So what on earth do you have in mind?”


Putzenkopf looked back down at his tablet and began to read. “He has refused his assent to laws. He has forbidden the passage of laws of immediate and pressing importance. He has refused to pass other laws in the interest of large segments of the population. He has sought to fatigue the legislature in order to obtain their compliance with his tyranny. He has acted as the legislature, misusing his executive powers to create new laws. He has endeavored to prevent states from enforcing legally mandated immigration policies. He has obstructed the administration of justice through inappropriate use of his veto power. He has expanded government bureaucracy to unprecedented size and ordered its officers to harass the citizenry. He has…”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Aren’t these impeachment charges of yours against President Obama just paraphrases of the complaints about King George III that Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues listed in the Declaration of Independence?”
“Well, what if they are?” Putzenkopf shrugged. “The House of Representatives is controlled by a Republican majority. It won’t matter what we accuse Obama of, the House will vote to impeach him.”
“Perhaps so,” I conceded. “But the Constitution says that an impeached President must be tried by the Senate. Isn’t it possible, with a Democratic majority in the Senate, that Obama might get a fair trial? And if so, wouldn’t it be better for the Republican-controlled House to have impeached him for some, shall we say, more relevant and believable transgressions?”
“Okay,” Putzenkopf nodded grudgingly, “That’s why I was sent here – to get your analysis and input. God knows you charge enough for it. So, how about the birth certificate thing, then? Like Tim Walberg from the Michigan Republican delegation said, impeachment is the only way to get to the bottom of the Kenyan birth cover-up and prove, once and for all, that it was illegal for Barack Hussein Obama to be President in the first place.”
“Maybe something a little bit less apropos of an aluminum-foil hat would be better,” I suggested.
“You’re not going to argue,” he maintained, “that the Obama administration refusing to defend Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court cases didn’t amount to a ‘high crime or misdemeanor,’ are you?”
“I’m not a lawyer,” I chided. “I am a policy consultant. I would note, however, that a majority of the Supreme Court agreed with the Obama administration. That wouldn’t help your case against him in the Senate very much, would it?”
“All right,” he sighed, “how about the Bowe Bergdahl incident? The Obama administration obviously engaged in secret negotiations with terrorists to get him released, and Obama did that without the legally mandated Congressional review. Ipso facto, that’s a ‘high crime or misdemeanor,’ am I right?”
“Bergdahl was an American prisoner of war, and under international law, he was being illegally held.” I pointed out. “Those facts forgive a world of potential sins, even before they happen. So no dice, the applicable Latin phrase here is actually res ipsa loquitur.”
“The Libya No-Fly Zone!” Putzenkopf proposed. “That was clearly illegal! Bruce Fein’s a lawyer – he worked for the Reagan administration! He says so!”
“I’m not sure the endorsement of a lawyer who worked for the man behind the Iran-Contra scandal will carry much weight,” I replied.
“ISIS, then,” he shot back. “What about ISIS? If Obama allowing the world’s first terror state to emerge on his watch isn’t a ‘high crime or misdemeanor,’ then what is?”
“That’s like saying FDR should have been impeached for letting the Tojo, Mussolini, Franco and Hitler come to power,” I observed. “It just doesn’t pass the common sense sniff-test. And besides, there wouldn’t be any ISIS if George W. Bush hadn’t invaded Iraq under the false pretense that Saddam Hussein controlled weapons of mass destruction.”
“How about this, then?” Putzenkopf demanded. “Michelle Malkin and Steven Seagal both say Obama broke the law by willfully disregarding the safety of our ambassador to Libya and his diplomatic staff during the attack on our embassy in Benghazi.”
“It’s highly unlikely,” I assured him, “that the foreign policy insights of Michelle Malkin and Steven Seagal will convince any Democratic members of the Senate that President Obama broke the law.”
“Obama and his cronies secretly supported the Islamist overthrow of the Egyptian government!” Putzenkopf loudly alleged. “How about that, huh?”
“Got any proof?” I asked.
“Proof?” Putzenkopf snorted. “Who needs proof? We’ll just say it, over and over again, until it sounds like there’s proof! It worked for climate change skepticism, didn’t it?”
“True, tactics like that might work with the public,” I acknowledged. “But there’s no way repeating something that sounds plausible over and over will have your desired effect on a majority of Democrat senators.”
“Okay, maybe so, but speaking of climate change,” he offered, “the Obama EPA power plant regulations on carbon dioxide emissions are clearly a violation of the Constitution. Why don’t the House Republicans charge him with that?”
“You’re appealing to a very Jesuitical distinction in the Separation of Powers clauses and the Tenth Amendment,” I cautioned. “The federal government has had legal jurisdiction over air quality since 1970. Considering carbon dioxide content to be a factor in determining air quality hardly sounds like a crime to most people, and it’s not going to sound like a crime to most United States senators, either – probably not even to most Republican senators, in fact.”
“He’s offering health care to illegal aliens!” Putzenkopf thundered. “That’s illegal… aliens… you hear me? Illegal aliens. It’s got ‘illegal’ right there in it!  You saying it’s not illegal to give taxpayer funded assistance to illegal aliens?”
“It might or might not be illegal,” I opined, “but even if it is illegal, it’s doubtful such an infraction would rise to the level of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ as expressed in the Constitution.  In the eyes of even the current Supreme Court, it would be viewed more like a political traffic violation or parking ticket, I would suspect.”
“Okay,” he fumed, “while we’re on the subject of health care, Obama lied to the American people when he said, ‘If you like your plan, you can keep it.’ He lied so he could get his Obamacare bill passed into a law!”
“If it were a crime for politicians to lie,” I assured him, “the prisons would be nearly full and the legislatures almost completely empty. No way that’s going to fly. In fact, if you pursue that particular charge in a presidential impeachment, it’s so absurd, you will run the risk of appearing completely ridiculous.”
“How about the IRS scandal, then?” Putzenkopf grumbled. “Jackbooted IRS thugs illegally persecuting patriotic political organizations under direct orders from the White House!”
“After the dust settled,” I recalled, “it became clear that the IRS was investigating 501(c)(4) organizations across the entire political spectrum. So while what a few agents were doing might have been illegal, any charge that the Obama administration was illegally using the IRS to target political opponents simply won’t stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny.”
“The NSA scandal!” Putzenkopf yelled. “Doesn’t Obama spying on everything everybody does qualify as a ‘high crime or misdemeanor?’ If invading the privacy of every law abiding, God-fearing, red-blooded American isn’t a crime, shouldn’t it be?”
“What should be a federal crime,” I responded, “is for the Congress to propose and the Supreme Court to dispose. But all of the significant NSA surveillance programs you’re referring to were originated by George W. Bush. You’re not arguing that he should have been impeached, if somebody like Ed Snowden had revealed such conduct during the Bush years, are you?”
“The Veterans Affairs scandal, then!” Putzenkopf said with an obvious air of desperation. “How about that?”
“The VA has been a huge scandal pit for decades,” I told him. “It’s pretty much common knowledge. If Obama deserves to be impeached because of how the VA is run, then so did Clinton, both Bushes, Reagan and Carter. Face it, you’re grasping a straws now.”
“All right, all right,” Putzenkopf relented, “you win – I believe you. There’s nothing we’ve got that’s sufficiently compelling evidence of an illegal act that would qualify as a ‘high crime or misdemeanor’ in a trial held by a Democrat controlled Senate.”
“So,” I concluded, “with a Republican majority in the House, you can impeach Obama, at least. But if you do that, you risk alienating the independent voters who support you, together with whatever moderate Republicans there may still be hanging around in the party. And there’s no way you could ever get the Senate to convict him. On the other hand, if you wait until after the November elections…”
Putzenkopf’s eyes went wide. He leaned forward in anticipation. “Yes… yes, suppose we wait until after November, then what?”
“Then it’s just possible,” I hypothesized, “that the Republicans might have control of both the House and the Senate. At which point, you could accuse Obama of Thomas Jefferson’s list of grievances against King George III and the House would still impeach him. And the Senate might well convict him, too, obviously, voting on party lines. The Republicans would need to pick up all six available Democratic Senate seats in the November, and of course, not lose any. And even with fifty-one Republican senators, you’d still need sixteen Democrats to get the two-thirds majority required to convict, but…”
“But if we were the majority party in the Senate,” Putzenkopf interjected, in the midst of a sudden mental fugue state, “yeah… right…. we’d have control of all the committees… some of the smaller states with Democratic senators… ah, yeah, some of the Democrats from the south or the midwest… yeah… okay… okay… I can see that. It could be done.”
“Of course,” I reminded him, “if you do in fact succeed in removing Obama from office in 2015, that will automatically make Joe Biden President of the United States for two years.”
“Oh my God, yes, I know!” Putzenkopf exclaimed. “But how about if we impeach Biden, too, as Obama’s accomplice? Then they both get removed from office and John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House, becomes President!”
“Look,” I reasoned, “why don’t we consider a less… traumatic… alternative? How about this – you Republicans win back the Senate in 2014 and then wait a couple of years until 2016 when you will, given the way the political pendulum tends to swing in the country, almost assuredly manage to get a Republican into the White House?”
Putzenkopf considered my recommendation for a moment. “What? And take all the fun out of it?”
“Fun?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he affirmed. “You’re saying we should just be patient and play the game and we’ll get a Republican President and Republican control of both houses of Congress. But where’s the part when we get to humiliate that [expletive] [expletive] Democrat Kenyan [expletive]?”
“But is that really necessary?” I inquired.
“Hell, yeah!” Putzenkopf insisted.
“Even at the risk,” I pressed him, “of losing support from the independent and moderate voters whom you desperately need to accomplish your goals of taking over the Senate and the White House?”
“You bet your [expletive],” he confirmed, steadfastly nodding his head with an air of determination.
“For Christ’s sake, why?” I implored.
“Well,” he declared “It’s… the God-damned principle of the thing, that’s what!”