Impeachment: Palin's crusade, GOP's headache
Sarah Palin has joined a rising drumbeat of Republicans who call for President Barack Obama's impeachment. Democrats can barely conceal their glee.
It's hard to think of anything that would give a bigger boost to the Democrats' currently gloomy prospects in November's mid-term elections.
It wasn't all that long ago, you may recall, that a similar Republican overreach in pursuit of President Bill Clinton on far more serious charges backfired against the Grand Old Party.
The controversial build-up to Clinton's impeachment in December 1998 (he was later acquitted by the Senate) helped to make that year the first time since the early 1800s that the non-presidential party had failed to gain seats in the mid-term election of a President's second term.
That's not the sort of history that Republicans with more than half a brain would like to repeat. Yet a rising drumbeat of GOP senators and congressmen has invoked the I-word over the past couple of years, egged on by the party's rabidly Obamaphobic tea party wing.
Mainly they accuse Obama of overstepping his authority with executive actions he has taken to dodge Republican gridlock in Congress. This is always a legitimate debate to be made about checks-and-balances, as it was when left-wing Democrats raised it against George W. Bush, among other GOP presidents.
But a move to impeach sounds like overreach. A president can be impeached under the Constitution for "treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors," not for policy disputes.
Bill Clinton lied under oath. Richard Nixon authorized burglaries and orchestrated a cover-up. What's Barack Obama's offense in the eyes of his conservative accusers? He has refused to govern like one of them. Horrors.
To divert the rising right-wing tide away from political disaster without offending his party's conservative base, House Speaker Boehner, a veteran of the last impeachment battle, recently announced a less-goofy alternative: Don't impeach, sue!
He elaborated in a statement issued Thursday that the lawsuit would challenge the president's decision, without consulting Congress, to delay imposing penalties on employers who do not offer health insurance to employees in compliance with the Affordable Care Act.
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