King isn't just about demonizing immigrants. He has other hobbies too.
I'm not sure if crazy-ass House Republicans holding an entire committee meeting to talk about impeaching or not impeaching the president for
reasons is made better or worse by their insistence on
not using the word.
It is, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said from the dais, “the word that we don’t like to say in this committee, and I’m not about to utter here in this particular hearing.”
Of course not everyone is as rational and well-mannered as the esteemed congressman from Feverdream, so the word was used plenty. Some struggled more than others:
Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.), who has said there are enough votes in the House to impeach Obama, added: “We’ve also talked about the I-word, impeachment, which I don’t think would get past the Senate in the current climate. . . . Is there anything else we can do?”
And Rep. Steve Stockman (R-AlsoFromTexas) has actually drafted up some impeachment papers and has been passing them around in the House, presumably as ersatz IQ test for his fellow members. It's possible we might be able to graph the cravenness of the various members of the GOP impeachment caucus according to what they think they ought to be impeaching the President of the United States
for; as Milbank efficiently catalogs, the reasons range from
Benghazi!! (Inhofe, Chaffetz) to gun policy (resident House cokehead Radel) to the debt ceiling (effing Gohmert, who does not know what either of those two words mean) to whatever the hell Bachmann keeps going on about on any given day.
For House Republicans, the prime obstacle to impeaching the scary man in the White House is not Senate skepticism but the seemingly impossible chore of getting all the impeachment peddlers in the House to get their stories straight. Sorting through Darrell Issa's shopping cart of supposed presidential crimes alone would take months (and would be a damn fine episode of Hoarders, if you're into that sort of thing. Mr. Issa, are you ever really going to need these crumpled napkins with Solyndra theories scrawled on them? Are you sure? Tell you what, let's just set those over here for now.)
We should have known early on that the House Republicans would begin experimenting with impeachment. Sure, it is only casual use now—they only do it in social situations, never alone—but there's only so many dozens of times a congressperson can pass the same bills repealing Obamacare before that old high finally fades for good. Now they're on to the stronger stuff. No, what we need here is a little bit of the I-word: Intervention!