Why do Democrats Republicans keep talking about impeachment?
Several Tea Party groups are organizing an event they’ve dubbed “National Impeach Obama Week” which will occur near the end of this month.
via TPM
“Gerald Ford said after the Nixon was forced to resign under threat of impeachment that an ‘impeachable offense’ is whatever the Congress will vote for at a given time. We are not here to argue about what is impeachable, but to demand that this lawless, subversive and anti-American president be removed from office,” the organizers wrote on the Impeach Obama Week website.
What do the organizers of Impeach Obama Week list as impeachable offenses? Let’s take a look.
The first thing that stands out (because I emphasized it) is that the organizers of the event are Birthers, but take a look at the other “impeachable offenses” they list.
Highlights include the “assassination of three American citizens without due process via drone bombings” and “supporting Al Qaeda and other Jihadist terrorists in Syria and elsewhere” among other things.
Nearly everything listed is attributable to conspiracy theories that, in some cases, have been floated by sitting members of congress and congressional candidates. The president hasn’t lied about Benghazi, as a Republican-controlled House committee confirmed last week, and he hasn’t unilaterally granted amnesty or taken your guns. He also hasn’t engaged American forces in any conflicts that he doesn’t have the authority to. And the idea that he encouraged immigrant children to flood into the country for some nefarious political purpose is raw, xenophobic tripe.
It appears the only thing listed that has actually happened is the drone strikes but very few people would call those “assassinations.” And in this case it’s very curious that a group who accuses the president of supporting terrorists would fall on their swords for Americans who essentially renounced their citizenship and became terrorists.
In hindsight, the only surprise is that they didn’t list NSA spying as an impeachable offense, otherwise they would have struck the far-left and far-right trifecta. Maybe they’ll amend it.
While we’re on the subject of impeachment — The Hill featured a very deceptive column today in which it is claimed that Democrats talk about impeachment far more often than Republicans do.
If you use the same metric as The Hill did, you may come to the same conclusion, and you’d be wrong.
Congressional Democrats have talked about the impeachment of President Obama 20 times more than Republicans have on the House and Senate floors.
Since the start of the 113th Congress last year, Democrats have used the word “impeach” or “impeachment” regarding Obama 86 times, according to a review of the Congressional Record by The Hill.
If the only metric you use is mentions of impeachment on the floor of Congress, you may find that Democrats have mentioned it more often than Republicans, but you’d be missing the overwhelming majority of mentions by Republicans that have occurred on talk radio, at fundraisers, at private dinners, at town hall meetings, on cable news, and in local media interviews.
Democrats who have mentioned impeachment on the floor of Congress have done so to push back against rumblings of impeachment outside of the House and Senate chambers.