Reject Impeachment — Wither the Constitution

We wrote in a recent Veritaspac piece that we did not believe that Congress and the Supreme Court must, or would, stand helplessly by and watch a president defy the law, the Constitution, and the undeniably expressed will of the American people.

It was beyond our comprehension that this great nation could be morally, politically, and socially destroyed by a president it willingly elected to faithfully carry out the responsibilities granted by the Constitution.

We called for members of Congress to demand that the Supreme Court exercise its obligation to ensure the Constitution is upheld by both of the other branches of government and stay the very apparent (beyond) questionably unlawful actions of this president.

Well, folks, Andrew McCarthy, highly respected former federal prosecutor and recognized Constitutional authority, as much dismayed as we are over Barack Obama’s blatant exercise of his dictatorial impulses, says that the nation is just that helpless!

In the column excerpted below he says there is no legal recourse to halt Obama’s steady and accelerating transformation of America into a tyrannical dictatorship, short of defunding and/or impeachment.

Since our newly elected “leaders” have “taken off the table” both of these remedies, (and do not reinstate them) it seems clear that by January of 2016, whatever happens in that year’s presidential election, this nation will be unrecognizable, forever, to anyone who once admired the vision and wisdom with which America’s forefathers created it.

Amnesty and Impeachment . . . Cont’d

” . .  the illegal-immigration amnesty that the president will soon unilaterally decree, and which (as the column explains) I believe he will use the pardon power to carry out, will be an amnesty for many, many criminal offenses besides immigration transgressions. The president’s pardon power is plenary: Neither Congress nor the courts can stop Obama from using it. And winning elections is not a solution: No future Republican president could reverse Obama’s pardons. The only real check on abuse of the pardon power is impeachment.

As for the abuse of prosecutorial discretion, it is theoretically possible for Congress to counter it with the power of the purse — and personally, I see no reason why Congress should continue to fund, at today’s astronomical levels, Departments of Justice and Homeland Security that refrain from enforcing laws, lawlessly confer benefits Congress has not enacted on illegal aliens, and stonewall when called to account for the administration’s schemes. But let’s face it: GOP leadership is scared to death of taking a stand that could lead to even a very partial government shutdown. It is highly unlikely that Congress is going to start slashing agency funding in a meaningful way. Consequently, impeachment becomes the last remaining check on the president’s refusal to enforce the laws . . .

As I’ve contended for six years, Obama is guided only by his political calculations, not the law or his oath of office. Last week’s was the last election that mattered to him personally. That’s why so much bad stuff — amnesty,Obamacare mandates, capitulation to Iran, the Vietnam-ization of Iraq/Syria, Gitmo closure, net neutrality, etc. — was put off until it was over. The president’s interest in future elections lies in the preservation and expansion of the transformation he has overseen. That portends three things: the exploitation of Obama’s raw power as far as he thinks he can get away with it (which is very far); the appointment of as many progressive judges as possible, since their life-tenure can consolidate and extend the “change” he has wrought for decades to come; and the orchestration of massive immigration amnesty with a route to citizenship and voting rights for illegal aliens who, Obama and the Left reckon, could give Democrats a permanent governing majority.

I am not unrealistic about our political possibilities, but I insist on being clear-eyed about our options. So I will repeat the point that I wrote Faithless Execution to make. Our constitutional system assumes impeachment is a serious, viable check on executive maladministration — in some egregious instances, it is the only check. The Framers could have designed the system a different way, but they did not. If you have a lawless and abusive president, and you nevertheless disavow the only weapon the system gives you to fight a rogue executive, you are going to get more lawlessness and abuse. Period.

Impeaching Obama would be a very unpleasant choice, and there is clearly no appetite for it. But living with what he is otherwise going to do over the next two years (on top of what he has already done) will be a more unpleasant choice. And there are no other choices.

We recommend the entirety of the McCarthy column linked above. The portion prior to our excerpt delineates much leading up to his conclusion. …and weep for America and your children and grandchildren if nothing substantive is done.  McCarthy wrote a follow-up article further supporting the position that impeachment is an appropriate remedy, inherently a political act. In doing so he invokes tangential support from certain of the conservative commentariat. An excerpt from that article follows.

In the end, Megyn Kelly framed the major argument for impeachment, one that cuts across partisan lines — or at least ought to — this way: President Obama mulishly repeats a syllogism — he has patiently waited for Congress to act on his call for immigration “reform” (i.e., amnesty); Congress has refused; and therefore he must act unilaterally. This, Ms. Kelly and Dr. Krauthammer agreed, is a perversion of our constitutional system, in which the president presses policy arguments but Congress decides what becomes law. When Congress does not defer to the president’s wishes, it is not shirking its responsibilities — it is executing those responsibilities by saying “no.” Kelly and Krauthammer offered fitting hypotheticals: Imagine a Republican president who says he will use prosecutorial discretion to excuse people who harass women trying to enter abortion clinics; or such a president who, confronted by the Democrats’ failure to enact his demanded repeal of the capital-gains tax, says, “If they don’t act, I will,” and promptly issues an executive order directing the IRS not to collect the tax.

In the past, presidents acting in such ways would surely have been impeached. But as Kelly and Krauthammer illustrated, tolerating Obama’s lawlessness invites a destructive new era of dictatorial presidency. Not all future presidents will be liberal Democrats. Even with the press as the wind at their backs, Democrats faced with a Republican president who exploits Obama’s precedents to impose his agenda lawlessly will experience what Republicans are going through today: They will have insufficient support for ending the lawlessness. Obama will have devolved us into a banana republic where might makes right.

DLH

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