Impeaching the President
WASHINGTON -- Sarah Palin is right about impeaching President Obama.
No, not that the president should be impeached. But Palin is correct in arguing that, for those who assert that Obama has grievously abused his executive authority, impeachment is the proper course of action.
Of course this won't happen, for the obvious reason that this tactic didn't go so well for Republicans last time. Hence House Speaker John Boehner's curt dismissal of Palin's call for impeachment: "I disagree."
Boehner's alternative -- a lawsuit -- offers the political benefits of draining impeachment fever from the more rabid Republican precincts while rallying the base against Obama-as-evil-overlord, sans electoral downside.
"This isn't about Republicans versus Democrats; it's about the legislative branch versus the executive branch, and above all protecting the Constitution," Boehner pronounced in unveiling a resolution to authorize the lawsuit. "If this president can get away with making his own laws, future presidents will have the ability to as well. The House has an obligation to stand up for the legislative branch, and the Constitution."
Yet Boehner's proposed lawsuit whittles down these grand claims of presidential overreach to a more picayune point: Obama's move to delay imposing penalties on employers who fail to provide health insurance, as required by the Affordable Care Act.
That's right: By Boehner's lights, Obama's abuse of authority involves delaying a requirement -- a delay, incidentally, intended to help businesses -- of a law that Boehner's House has voted more than 50 times to repeal. (Never mind that, as Ezra Klein of Vox has pointed out, President George W. Bush unilaterally waived Medicare Part D penalties for low-income and disabled seniors late to enroll -- with nary a peep from Boehner.)
The suit is destined to fail and, in any event, would take longer to resolve than the one-year mandate delay. Federal courts wisely don't want to referee fights between the other two branches. So Boehner's suit faces the twin hurdles of standing (what is the concrete injury to the House?) and then whether the case presents a political question that courts are bound to duck.
Meanwhile, the Constitution that Boehner claims to be defending offers two actual solutions to his purported injury.
The first, for presidential offenses that do not rise to the level of impeachment, is legislating. If Congress disagrees with the mandate delay, it can pass a law. If Obama balks, Congress has the power of the purse to force compliance.
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Copyright 2014 Washington Post Writers Group
