Return to Sanity: Of Course He Should Be Impeached

English: Barack Obama delivering his electoral...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last week, Jeffrey Lord asked the following question in this space: “Should Obama be impeached?” I have enormous respect for Lord, and agree with virtually everything he writes, but his column reflects an unsettling trend in the way many view this issue. Most pundits and politicians discuss Obama’s serial violations of the Constitution as if mulling an interesting academic subject. They ponder such arcana as the definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the number of Senate votes required to convict an impeached President, the effect of the process on the GOP’s electoral prospects in 2016, ad infinitum. Few, however, discuss impeachment as a serious possibility or even a rational course of action.

In a less complacent nation, Lord’s question would not be rhetorical. It is the duty of the House of Representatives to impeach Obama. Every member of Congress takes an oath to defend the Constitution and the President has declared war on that foundational document. Barack Obama is systematically destroying the checks and balances the framers put in place to limit the power of the office he holds. The powers of the Presidency, as the founders conceived them, were meant to be constrained by two coequal branches of the government — the national legislature and the judiciary. President Obama routinely flouts inconvenient laws passed by the former and publicly excoriates the latter when its rulings displease him.

Much of what this man has done since taking office is clearly illegal, and he is becoming more and more brazen about it every day. His most recent crime against the Constitution was, of course, his latest unilateral revision of the deadline by which businesses must conform to Obamacare’s employer mandate. This mandate, according to the stipulations of the health care “reform” law, should have taken effect January 1. However, that date proved politically inconvenient for the Democrats, so Obama ordered his minions to change the deadline — twice — despite lacking any legal authority to do so. What has been done by the people invested with the power to put a stop to such illegal decrees? Virtually nothing.

Why not? In the words of Senator Ted Cruz, “There aren’t enough votes in the Senate.” I admire Senator Cruz, but he is evidently confused. It is true that, to remove a President from office, a two-thirds majority of the Senate must vote to convict him of charges emanating from the House impeachment process. However, impeachment itself is a separate step — roughly analogous to an indictment in a criminal court — and requires only a simple majority in the House of Representatives. Today, the Republicans control that body by a margin of more than thirty seats. In other words, one or more articles of impeachment could be passed against Obama in the House of Representatives without a single Democrat vote.

Why would the GOP pursue such a controversial course when they know the Senate will never produce the super majority required to convict Obama? That question, the opinion of Senator Cruz notwithstanding, is utterly irrelevant. If a policeman sees a thief picking your pocket, should he stand by and ponder the very real possibility that some clever defense attorney might help the criminal escape justice? Of course not. It’s his job to arrest the pickpocket and make sure that he faces trial for his crime. Then, even if a corrupt judge or a simple-minded jury lets the crook off, at least he has done his job. In the case under discussion here, Obama is the crook and the House of Representatives is the policeman.

Presented with this analogy, Obama would no doubt say, “I am not a crook.” Well, we’ve heard that one before. The facts tell a different story. Indeed, the President’s catalogue of crimes is so long that one hardly knows what to highlight first. Perhaps a good place to begin is with fiats like his latest rewriting of Obamacare. These decrees have quite unnerved George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, a liberal who voted for Obama twice. Turley recently described them as follows: “What we’re seeing now is the usurpation of authority that’s unprecedented in this country … a system in which a single individual is allowed to rewrite legislation … is a system that borders on authoritarianism.”