• U.S. House clears way for suit against president
• How troubles of Nixon, Clinton began
IN what was described across America as a prelude to impeachment bogeyman to embarrass the United States President Barack Obama before the November midterm election, House Republicans have voted to proceed with a lawsuit against him.
The House dominated by the Republicans said that his executive actions are so extreme that they violate the Constitution. It was believed in the ruling Democratic Party that the move will pave the way for impeachment of the president before the 2016 presidential election.
‘They’re mad I’m doing my job’
The nearly party-line vote — all Democrats voted against it, and all but five Republicans voted for it — further agitated an already polarised climate in the U.S. Congress as both parties used the pending suit to try to rally support ahead of the November elections.
Halfway across the continent, Obama almost gloated at the prospect of being sued.
“They’re going to sue me for taking executive actions to help people. So they’re mad I’m doing my job,” Obama said in an economics speech in Kansas City, Mo. “And by the way, I’ve told them I’d be happy to do it with you. The only reason I’m doing it on my own is because you’re not doing anything,” he said of Congress on Wednesday.
The clash came a day before Congress is scheduled to begin a 51 / 2-week summer break and as must-pass bills on reshaping veterans’ health care and highway construction appeared headed for passage — while almost everything else was not.
For instance, the House and Senate moved in dramatically different directions on a controversial legislation designed to deal with the flow of thousands of unaccompanied Central American minors arriving at the border. This immigration issue appears to be one of the points at issue the GOP would like to shake President Obama with. The Republicans have consistently said President Obama has not been serious about the flow of unaccompanied minors from Central America that daily flood the border.
Expecting a flurry of work once the elections are over in November, leaders in both parties have instead tried to position their rank-and-file to take advantage of the gridlock by blaming the other side.
Like in Nigeria, charges of ineptitude, indolence rage
Just as Nigerians always accuse their own federal legislature of ineptitude and indolence, most Americans and indeed the media believe that by the time this year ends, the 113th Congress is all but assured of being the least productive in recorded history in terms of passing legislation signed into law. Nigerians also say this of the country’s lawmakers: That they have been the least productive when their perks are juxtaposed with their productivity so far.
The details of Speaker John A. Boehner’s lawsuit mattered little — it focuses on a narrow portion of the landmark health-care law — and instead each side focused on the larger symbolism that divides the bi-cameral legislature in America at the moment.
Democrats linked the lawsuit to calls from outspoken conservative activists urging the impeachment of Obama, a battle cry that Democrats have amplified in an effort to raise money and get people to vote.
Former Speaker and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), glaring at Republicans during the heated debate, accused Boehner (R-Ohio) her successor in office of caving into “impeachment-hungry extremists.”
“Tell them impeachment is off the table. That’s what I had to do,” she said, noting several attempts by liberals to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney while she was House speaker.
Discontent over climate change, immigration rules, health care
Boehner, who has repeatedly said impeachment is not in the cards, connected the suit to a series of executive orders that Obama issued on climate change, immigration rules, the health care law and raising the minimum wage for federal contractors, saying that those were power grabs that did not have requisite backing from Congress.
The Speaker asked rhetorically during the debate, “Are you willing to let anyone tear apart what our founders built?” The lawsuit is the culmination of heightened conflict since Obama took office in 2009, particularly since Boehner became speaker more than three years ago. The Republicans have been mulling impeachment of President Obama who is not ready to compromise with the GOP members as suggested by some political pundits in Washington.
It is also unprecedented in its nature. Plenty of Congress members, in both parties, have filed lawsuits or briefs in support of suits against presidents. Generally, federal judges dismiss the cases because usually only those affected by the law had locus to file suit.
Conservative legal scholars’ support for Republicans
The novel idea for the vote on Thursday was reportedly driven by a clutch of conservative legal scholars who contend that the best way for Republicans to have legal standing in federal court is if the entire body passes legislation authorising it.
Democrats have predicted the courts would dismiss the suit, while mocking Republicans for their choice of focusing the fight on Obama’s decisions to delay certain mandates in the health law — a law that GOP lawmakers unanimously oppose and do not want to see implemented in any way.
The influential Washington Post reports that if the federal courts take up the matter, it could take years to reach conclusion and may have a larger impact on setting the parameters of the balance between the next president and Congress.
The Post said: “The short-term impact will be the political jockeying in the next three months. Democrats said the lawsuit would turn off middle-of-the-road voters who begin to make up their minds in the late summer and early fall, suggesting it would distract from the economic issues Republicans hope to focus on.”
Rep. Steve Israel (N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview: “They are limping into August, wrestling with themselves over impeachment, and being criticised for suing the president instead of addressing issues that matter to the middle class. This is not the August recess that they anticipated.”
Clash of lawmakers
In a four-day span after a top Obama adviser said he took the threat of impeachment seriously, the DCCC sent a flurry of fundraising pitches and brought in more than $2 million.
In the floor debate, the two sides clashed in most trenchant terms.
Republicans defended the lawsuit as a way of protecting Congress from executive overreach.
“I believe in this institution,” said Rep. Richard B. Nugent (R-Fla.). “I believe in the Constitution.”
Democrat after Democrat focused remarks on impeachment, which they said would be the logical outcome of a lawsuit asking the courts to say Obama had violated the Constitution.
Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, called it a “monumental waste of time, energy and funds” that is designed only to encourage conservative voters to back Republicans this fall.
“This is a political manoeuver timed to peak as Americans are going to the polls in November for the midterm elections,” Slaughter said. “This lawsuit is the drumbeat pushing members of the Republican Party to impeachment.”
In Kansas City, Obama did not bring up the hot topic of a possible impeachment proceeding. Instead, he showered attention on the lawsuit, relishing the opportunity to belittle the GOP.
“Stop being mad all the time. Stop just hating’ all the time,” Obama said at the Uptown Theatre. “Everyone sees this as a political stunt, but it’s worse than that because every vote they’re taking … means a vote they’re not taking to help people.”
The origin
A report in The Post reveals most of the political shenanigans that shape the impeachment plots for project 2016 in the U.S. nation’s capital. The report says if Republicans want to know why Democrats are talking incessantly about impeachment, even fundraising off the possibility, they need only look to themselves for the answer. The GOP leadership has resisted every opportunity to kill the idea. Sure, House Speaker John Boehner called it “all a scam started by Democrats at the White House,” before adding, “We have no plans to impeach the president. We have no future plans.” But that’s cold comfort given his use of the present tense and his demonstrated inability to keep his calamitous caucus in line.
For Democrats to not take the impeachment threat seriously would be unwise and profoundly foolish. The question from Chris Wallace of Fox News to incoming House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) on Sunday was really quite simple. If President Obama took executive action to solve the immigration crisis on the southern border would “you consider impeaching the president?” Now, in the old days, before the tea party swarmed the Capitol with folks who neither know nor have the temperament for governing, when a member of the Democratic Party leadership was asked the impeachment question with regard to President George W. Bush, the answer was clear and definitive. “I have said it before and I will say it again: Impeachment is off the table,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the incoming speaker of the House, said at a news conference the day after Democrats took back control of the chamber in 2006.
Democrats were champing at the bit to impeach Bush over the Iraq War, but Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership put the kibosh on that right quick. Not today’s Republican leadership.
WALLACE: . . . You’re already suing the president for overreach. The question I have is, if he does this, if he takes executive action [to defer deportation for millions of immigrants], which I know you all believe is illegal, will you do nothing, will you do something such as cut off funding for the administration, will you consider impeaching the president?
SCALISE: You know, this might be the first White House in history that’s trying to start the narrative of impeaching their own president. Ultimately, what we want to do is see the president follow his own laws. But the president took an oath to faithfully execute the laws of this land and he’s not. In fact, the Supreme Court unanimously more than 12 times, unanimously said the president overreached and actually did things he doesn’t have the legal authority to do.
(CROSSTALK)
WALLACE: Again, on executive action to defer more deportations, what will the House do ?
SCALISE: We’ve made it clear. We’re going to put options on the table to allow — to allow the House to take legal action against the president when he overreaches his authority. Others have already done that. Cases are going to the Supreme Court. Like I said, more than a dozen times the Supreme Court unanimously — I’m not talking about a 5-4 decision — 9-0, unanimously said the president overreached. So, we’re going to continue to be a check and a balance against this administration.
WALLACE: But impeachment is off the table?
SCALISE: Well, the White House wants to talk about impeachment, and, ironically, they’re going out and trying to fundraise off that, too.
And Boehner wonders why impeachment talk is all the rage. A “No, don’t be ridiculous. We’re not going to impeach the president. Period!” from Scalise on Sunday or from Boehner today would have put an end to the chatter. But no. So the Democrats are doing their best with it in an off-year election that they know will not be kind to them, historically speaking.
Speaking at a press briefing with reporters on their efforts to reach African American voters, Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, didn’t hold back. “When Republicans talk about suing the president and when they lay the groundwork for impeachment, they motivate our base to vote in November,” he said. “There is nothing more motivating with our base than a House Republican leadership that is fixed on the destruction of this president’s agenda and will go so far as to impeach him to deny him success.”
Some think that Boehner’s lawsuit against the president is some sort of crafty manoeuver to punish Obama for myriad offences without getting into the political and historical messiness of impeachment. But Israel touched on the reason why I believe impeachment is coming. Republicans won’t be able to help themselves.
Fifty-seven per cent of Republicans in a recent poll support impeachment of the president of the United States. So when Republicans say, “No, we don’t really mean it,” they mean it. These same Republicans before the shutdown said, “No, we’re not going to shut down the government.” And they couldn’t help themselves. Now, they say, “We’re not actually going to impeach the president.” They won’t be able to help themselves. The reason that Steve Scalise on Sunday refused to rule out impeachment was a) he knows that 57 percent of his base wants impeachment, and b) he knows that the majority of his caucus in a leadership election wants to impeach the president. So they are going to be fuelled by this lawsuit-impeachment fervour, and we’re going to continue to talk about issues that matter to voters across the country.
That Democrats are using all this impeachment talk to raise money for their campaigns shouldn’t come as a surprise. Nor should the increased donations that follow. But don’t let their efforts or the side-eye-worthy accusations of playing politics from Republicans distract from the seriousness of the chatter or the Democratic endeavour. Talking about impeaching a president is not a “scam.” It’s a big deal. And a surefire way to stop it is for Boehner to repeat after Pelosi: “Impeachment is off the table.”
The Watergate scandal and Nixon impeachment threat.
It will be recalled that the 1974 Watergate scandal escalated, costing Nixon much of his political support, and on August 9, 1974, he resigned in the face of almost certain impeachment and removal from office. The bogeyman called impeachment is on the match in Washington again.
The last impeachment: Bill Clinton on Monica Lewinsky scandal
Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, was also impeached by the House of Representatives on two charges, one of perjury and one of obstruction of justice, on December 19, 1998. Two other impeachment articles, a second perjury charge and a charge of abuse of power, failed in the House. He was acquitted of both charges by the Senate on February 12, 1999.
Independent Counsel Ken Starr alleged that Clinton had broken the law during his handling of the Lewinsky scandal and the Paula Jones lawsuit. Four charges were considered by the full House of Representatives; only two passed, and those on a nearly party-line vote. It was only the second time in history that the House had impeached the President of the United States, and only the third that the full House had considered such proceedings.
The trial in the United States Senate began right after the seating of the 106th Congress, in which the Republicans began with 55 senators. A two-thirds majority (67 senators) was required to remove Clinton from office. Fifty senators voted to remove Clinton on the obstruction of justice charge and 45 voted to remove him on the perjury charge; no Democrat voted guilty on either charge.
Source: Guardian
