You've seen the numbers, 57% of Republicans want to impeach President Obama while only 35% of independents and 13% of Democrats thinks that's a good idea. The numbers for suing the President are almost as bad.
By a 57%-41% margin, Americans say House Republicans shouldn't file the suit. As with the question on impeachment, there's a wide partisan divide over the lawsuit.
And who can forget how the numbers for the GOP plummeted after their budget fights and shutting down the government.
You've got to be thinking, they really couldn't be that stupid to do this stuff right before an election are they? How many times have we underestimated the GOP stupidity, cruelty, and their efforts to undermine our very democracy?
But the real question here is, are Obama and the Dems engaged in some real 11 dimensional chess?
According to an article in the national memo;
President Barack Obama will propose broad-ranging executive action on immigration reform later this summer that could provoke Republicans into trying to impeach him, a senior White House official said Friday.
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it will mark “an important step in the arc of the presidency” that will shape both the substance and politics of immigration policy for years...
Now we all know how the Republicans hate having little brown diseased children storming our boarders. And with the extreme gerrymandering of 2010, most Republicans would suffer no political harm by threatening impeachment when 57% of your supporters want you to do it.
But given the overwhelming numbers of independents and Dems who oppose impeachment and suing the president, why wouldn't the white house want to be provocative just before the election?
Then there's this about a possible budget fight right before the elections.
Could the federal government shut down again this fall?
The idea sounds absurd on its face, especially one month before an election, and one year after Republicans took a drubbing in the polls for forcing a shutdown over Obamacare.
But it could happen.
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And there are two contentious issues in particular that are roped in with the CR debate.
The first is reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, which supports billions of dollars in U.S. exports and thousands of American jobs through loan guarantees and other products. Its charter expires on Oct. 1, and many House conservatives, including incoming Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), are enthusiastic about shutting the bank down,
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The second issue is the battle over President Barack Obama's recently proposed rules on coal-fired power plants to combat climate change. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who faces a tough reelection fight in his coal-heavy state, has aggressively fought to attach his amendment blocking the rule to appropriations legislation — an idea Senate Republicans strongly support — and has vowed to continue offering it on all government funding measures.
By any historical measurements, the Democrats should get crushed this year. It's the 6th year their party's presidency, the Republican scorched earth legislative policy works well with uninformed voters, The Republican anti-democracy voter suppression laws are in place, and there are big number of Democrats up for reelection in purple or red states.
But we've seen in the past, Republican Tea baggers can ruin the best opportunities a party has had in decades. And with poll numbers like those above, why wouldn't the President and the Dems in congress do everything they could to bring on more talk of impeachment, and have a big budget fight that brings us up to the point of shutting down the government?
But we Dems have our problems also. If we repeat 2010 and don't take this election as being the serious election it is, and if we don't get our weak Democratic supporters to understand our democracy and economy are under attack from Republican extremists and they have to vote to stop them, then it will be us who snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.