Who's really in charge?
Rep. Jim Clyburn is about to be
labeled a divider.
Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn is predicting that Republicans will try to impeach Barack Obama so that they can “put an asterisk” next to the name of the first black president.
“There will be some reason found to introduce an impeachment resolution,” the South Carolina congressman said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show.” “These Republicans have decided that this president must have an asterisk by his name after he leaves office, irrespective of whether or not he gets convicted. It is their plan to introduce an impeachment resolution.”
That's a bit mean; I think they genuinely haven't decided whether to try impeachment because, like everything else, it depends on the eternal battle between Republican leadership, which has an institutional memory of how these things tend to work out, and the twitchy, over-caffeinated members who don't care how things work out as long as they can pound their chests and make grunting sounds while their base is watching. Clyburn is right that none of the members who have been grumbling about impeachment throughout Obama's administration have ever identified any substantive reason to impeach him other than "doing stuff we don't like."
Is it, as Clyburn supposes, race based? That's been the question from the beginning, and there's no remaining question as to whether the tea party movement, of which nearly all House members of the impeachment brigade belong, is a racially motivated gaggle. It clearly is. Ah, but the Republican Party actually did try to impeach the last Democratic president before Obama, the contrary argument goes, so that proves the party isn't really racist, they just won't tolerate any leader from the other party. Not racist! Just unaccustomed as to how this whole "democracy" thing works!
I wonder if that logic holds up, however. They did indeed do the same to Bill Clinton, of course, but the Clinton "impeachment" was premised on a sex scandal after all other long-investigated avenues had run dry, none of them with a particular bearing on his duties as president (with the exception of the theory that the First Family was murdering their White House staff, which was an actual thing too—the conspiracy wing of the GOP has been in charge for a long time). This time they started with the initial premise that Barack Obama was not an actual American at all, a conspiracy premised on the notion of planted birth announcements in Hawaii newspapers and the like; it was not merely that Obama had done something scandalous, his mere existence was, according to various actual elected Republicans, the purported crime.
Those conspiracy theories having not panned out due to their obvious Blazing Stupidity, impeachment talk has not abated, merely moved on to other pastures. The current grumbles demand impeachment of the sitting president over his official actions as the sitting president—over executive orders, over something-something Benghazi, over not deporting a sufficient number of children, take your pick. Obama is not allowed to take actions taken by other presidents, of either party, even when (as is often the case) the objectionable policies were holdovers from those other presidents. Don't like immigration policies as they apply to minors? Blame Bush. Don't like environmental policies requiring better efficiency in certain home appliances? Again, blame the tree huggers of the last administration. The illegitimacy premise started out as a declaration of the supposed illegitimacy of Obama as leader, and continues as a declaration that Obama's standard duties as sitting president are themselves, compared to the other leaders that have taken similar or identical actions, now and only now illegitimate.
And again, nearly all such "impeachment" talk comes from representatives elected by the "tea party" movement, a group whose membership owns considerably more confederate flags than the general population.
Draw your own conclusions, but you'll find ample evidence on both sides of the argument. As always, the question on impeachment is whether its advocates are malevolent or merely dimwitted, and whether the party elders can dissuade their ranks from engaging in yet another lost cause merely for the sake of doing so. No wagering, please.