Building the political support for impeachment

Who is talking about impeachment? Well, of course, Obama and the Democrats. But also, thnkfully, Andrew McCarthy. He writes:

It has been nearly two months since the publication of my book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, helped intensify the national focus on presidential lawlessness — or, if you prefer, infected the nation with “impeachment fever.”

No surprise, then, that I took note of the very interesting question posed by National Review editor Rich Lowry in the title of a recent Corner post: “Does Obama WANT to Get Impeached?”

The context was the president’s plan to proceed with an outrageously lawless, unilaterally decreed amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. Obviously, this kind of massive malfeasance will provoke calls for impeachment — meaning, more calls than we already have. Rich incisively wonders whether that’s exactly what this flailing, cynical White House wants. Obama is brazenly intensifying what progressive law professor Jonathan Turley has acknowledged is “the worst constitutional crisis of [his] lifetime.” With midterm elections on the horizon, is the president calculating that inducing more Republican talk of impeachment will rally the Democratic base and, as Rich puts it, “drive the middle away from the GOP”?

The book’s major theme is that impeachment is a political remedy requiring broad public consensus, not a legal one triggered once impeachable offenses are provable.

Contrary to some less than informed opinion, “high crimes and misdemeanors” — the legal standard for impeachment — refers not to indictable criminal offenses but to profound breaches of the public trust by high-ranking officials. Once the standard is understood, it becomes easy to see that the president and his underlings have committed numerous, readily provable impeachable offenses. Yet, even if a president commits a hundred high crimes and misdemeanors, impeachment is a non-starter unless the public is convinced that the president should be removed from power. The real question is political: Are his lawlessness and unfitness so thoroughgoing that we can no longer trust him with the awesome power of the chief executive?

Consequently, Faithless Execution argues that there is a crucial step in between the realization that high crimes and misdemeanors have been committed and the issuance of credible calls for impeachment: The political case must be built that presidential lawlessness threatens our Constitution, our liberties, our security, and our standing as a Republic under the rule of law.

Prematurely filed articles of impeachment would trigger a Senate trial that would currently be unwinnable. As a practical matter, the two-thirds super-majority vote required to remove a president means that there must be broad public support for impeachment — enough to pressure 67 senators to approve it. Even if Republicans were not in the minority, and even if every one of them would vote to remove the president (another dubious assumption), you’d still need 15 or more Democrats.

The goal should be to restore a political environment in which presidential lawlessness is reviled and effectively discouraged.

In such an environment — which historically is the norm — the president’s now-supine opponents would have the confidence to use their considerable constitutional muscles to stop a lawless president, the president would see there were real downsides to rogue behavior, and there would be little need to speak of impeachment. Opponents would use the power of the purse aggressively; deny Obama funding for illegal initiatives (thus calling more public attention to the president’s lawlessness); cut funding to, or eliminate, the administrative agencies through which he seeks to rule unilaterally; deny him appointments to the courts and key federal offices; and impeach rogue subordinate officials — officials who do not enjoy the political support of a twice-elected president and who abuse the power of intensely unpopular agencies that Democrats would not want to defend.

Republicans and conservatives are struggling to find the right response to Obama’s lawlessness because Obama is, in fact, lawless.

Obama’s refusal to execute the laws faithfully is not in doubt. Only the same skewed thinking that has gotten Obama into the mess he’s in could now convince him that even more rampant presidential lawlessness will make the broad middle of the country sympathetic toward him.

The president’s problem is that impeachment talk has not arisen in a vacuum or been confined to the tea-party fever swamp of his imagination. It has been catalyzed by his flagrant violations of law and derelictions of duty. Disquiet has descended on a society that sees the rule of law devolving into executive caprice. On the world stage, it has become dangerous to be America’s ally — better to be Putin, Hamas, or the Taliban. There is a widening public recognition that the president’s vow to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” was not just campaign rhetoric. He really meant it.

The goal, however, is to stop the lawlessness and preserve the constitutional framework that protects our liberties. It may still be possible to do that without impeaching Obama . . . but not unless he is made to understand that he really could be impeached.

Read more here.