Obama A Republican Congress And Impeachment
Some Republicans are eager to impeach the President. Some are so eager that they go on the record saying that impeachment would probably pass the House. Representatives Barletta , Farenthold , and Senator Cruz say that the only obstacle is the Democratic Senate, which would not convict the President. The Washington Posts Jonathan Capehart took this a step further and argued Republican control of the Senate could result in President Obamas impeachment.
Regardless of who controls the Senate, the rationale presented by Cruz, Barletta, and Farenthold makes no sense. In no immediate future will Republicans control enough votes two-thirds of the Senate to remove the president from office. In order to reach the 66 vote threshold, Republicans need to win every single Senate election in November. Democrats may lose the Senate majority. However, no one believes Democrats will lose every single Senate race. More reasonable forecasts suggest Republicans will gain 5-6 seats. That is enough for a majority but not close to the amount necessary to remove Obama from office. In sum, there is no situation in which not having the votes is the reason impeachment has not been pursued.
There is a reasonable argument that the Republican Party, with a House majority insulated from electoral pain through a combination of safe districts packed with conservative constituents, would not hesitate to impeach Obama. He has been enemy number one since he stepped into office.
Efforts To Impeach Barack Obama
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During Barack Obama‘s tenure as President of the United States from 2009 to 2017, certain Republican members of Congress, as well as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, stated that Obama had engaged in impeachable activity and that he might face attempts to remove him from office. Rationales offered for possible impeachment ranged from Obama allowing people to use bathrooms based on their gender identity, to the 2012 Benghazi attack, to Obama’s enforcement of immigration laws, and false claims that he was born outside the United States.
Multiple surveys of U.S. public opinion found that a near supermajority of Americans rejected the idea of impeaching Obama, though a bit more than a simple majority of Republicans did support such efforts. For example, CNN found in July 2014 that 57% of Republicans supported impeachment, but in general, 65% of American adults, disagreed with impeachment with only 33% supporting such efforts.
How President Obama Will Be Impeached
Writing about Rep. Eric Cantors stunning primary defeat last week, I warned Democrats that the House majority leaders loss was as much a wake-up call for them as it was for the GOP. Well, now I want to warn them about a very real possibility: President Obama will be impeached if the Democrats lose control of the U.S. Senate.
Yeah, yeah, I read Aaron Blakes astute piece in The Post on the impeachment process. He says probably not to the question of whether the House could impeach Obama. But probably is not definitely. And with the way the impeachment talk has gone, probably not could become absolutely if the Senate flips to the Republicans.
Rep. Lou Barletta became the latest to openly discuss impeaching the president. In response to a question from a radio host on Monday, the two-term congressman who was swept in during the tea party wave of 2010, said, Obama is just absolutely ignoring the Constitution and ignoring the laws and ignoring the checks and balances. Articles of impeachment, he added, probably could pass in the House.
In a later interview, Barletta said one of the reasons he wouldnt vote for impeachment was because a Democrat-controlled Senate would never convict the Democrat president. Blake also mentions this parenthetically in his piece. Others who have talked about impeachment point to this as the reason not to pursue the extraordinary political rebuke.
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Reasons John Boehner Opted To Sue Obama Rather Than Impeach
While most Republicans favor impeachment, John Boehner recalls the losses that Republicans sustained in 1998 midterm elections, during the Clinton impeachment.
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In a near party-line vote, House Republicans on Wednesday approved 225 to 201 a resolution to sue President Obama or other administration officials for actions inconsistent with their duties under the Constitution.
Translation: Republicans accuse the president of executive overreach exceeding his constitutional powers and unlawfully going around Congress.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi calls the lawsuit “perilous and meritless.” President Obama dismissed it as a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. “Stop being mad all the time. Stop just hating all the time. Come on,” the president said during a speech in Kansas City, Mo., earlier in the day.
Some Republicans, such as former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, want the House to go further and impeach the president. A CNN poll last week shows that the majority of Republicans favor impeachment. So why would House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio opt for a lawsuit instead of impeachment?
Here are three reasons why:
Republican Voters Want To Impeach The President Good Luck With That
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and other Republicans calling for the impeachment of President Barack Obama might want to take a look at the history books and the U.S. Constitution before getting too excited about the idea.
Congress rarely uses its power to impeach, and when it has, impeachment has only infrequently — and in the case of a president, never — resulted in removal from office. Congress has initiated impeachment proceedings more than 60 times in the history of the United States. Just 19 of those cases have been tried by the Senate, and only eight federal judges have ever been convicted and removed from office.
Although House Speaker John Boehner has maintained he is not interested in pursuing impeachment, a top White House aide said Friday that he expected House Republicans to do just that. And a recent HuffPost/YouGov poll shows that one-third of Americans and two-thirds of Republicans believe Obama should be impeached. These numbers reflect an increasingly popular view in conservative circles, which Palin gave voice to earlier this month when she claimed the recent surge of undocumented immigrants at the border was an example of the president’s “rewarding of lawlessness.”
So, why do some conservatives appear to think this would be more of a Nixon than a Clinton situation?
Rep. Bob Goodlatte , chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, earlier this month offered perhaps the most sober rebuke to the calls for impeachment.
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Hundreds Of Historians Join A Call For Trumps Impeachment
More than 300 historians and constitutional scholars have signed an open letter calling for the impeachment and removal of President Trump. They say his continuation in office after encouraging supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol posed a clear and present danger to American democracy and the national security of the United States.
Those who signed the letter, released on Medium on Monday, include best-selling authors like Ron Chernow, Taylor Branch, Garry Wills and Stacy Schiff, as well as many leading academic historians. A number of the signatories had joined a previous letter in December 2019, calling for the presidents impeachment because of numerous and flagrant abuses of power including failure to protect the integrity of the impending 2020 election.
Since November 2020, the new letter says, Trump has refused to accept the results of a free and fair election, something no president before him has ever done.
Politically, the condemnation by historians may carry less weight than the presidents loss of support in recent days from business groups that once supported him or his policies. But David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers who drafted the new letter, said that historical expertise mattered.
In September, the American Historical Association issued a statement condemning the first White House History Conference, held at the National Archives .
Public Debate Over Impeachment Demands
In terms of background, U.S. public opinion widely opposed efforts made to impeach previous Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. CNN Polling Director Keating Holland has stated that their organization found that 69% opposed impeaching President Bush in 2006.
According to a July 2014 YouGov poll, 35% of Americans believed President Obama should be impeached, including 68% of Republicans. Later that month, a CNN survey found that about two thirds of adult Americans disagreed with impeachment efforts. The data showed intense partisan divides, with 57% of Republicans supporting the efforts compared to only 35% of independents and 13% of Democrats.
On July 8, 2014, the former Governor of Alaska and 2008 RepublicanVice Presidential nomineeSarah Palin publicly called for Obama’s impeachment for “purposeful dereliction of duty”. In a full statement, she said: “Itâs time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.”
Andrew McCarthy of the National Review wrote the book Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case For Obama’s Impeachment, which argued that threatening impeachment was a good way to limit executive action by Obama .
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Is The Supreme Court Likely To Save Obamacare
The Supreme Court is likely to leave in place the bulk of Obamacare, including key protections for pre-existing health conditions.
Conservative justices John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared in two hours of arguments to be unwilling to strike down the entire law a long-held Republican goal.
The courts three liberal justices are almost certain to vote to uphold the law in its entirety and presumably would form a majority by joining a decision that cut away only the mandate, which now has no financial penalty attached to it.
Leading a group of Democratic-controlled states, California and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives are urging the court to leave the law in place.
A decision is expected by late spring.
Meet The Impeachment Crowd: 6 Republicans Who Want Obama Out
From Sarah Palin to Tom Coburn, several Republicans are calling for impeachment.
— intro: Has President Obamas use of the pen and phone to circumvent Congress gotten out of hand?
Some members of the GOP seem to think so.
Even as the embattled president fights criticism over the escalating humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, the release of Arm. Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in return for five prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, and the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act, a mounting chorus of Republicans are calling for impeachment.
Heres a list of the high-profile Republicans who want to kick the president out of office:
quicklist: 1category: title: Sarah Palin url: text: Who Is She: 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, former governor of Alaska, sometime reality show host.
What She Said: Enough is enough of the years of abuse from this president. His unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, No mas. Opening our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants is deliberate. Its time to impeach.
When She Said It: July 8, 2014
media: 21159508caption: related:
quicklist: 2category: title: Tom Tancredo url: text: Who Is He: Former candidate for Colorado governor, 2008 Republican presidential hopeful, former congressman representing Colorados 6th Congressional District.
When He Said It: Valentines Day 2014
media: 24494513caption: related:
When He Said It: June 4, 2014
media: 24494378caption: related:
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Clyburn: Gop Will Try To Impeach Obama
Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn is predicting that Republicans will try to impeach Barack Obama so that they can put an asterisk next to the name of the first black president.
There will be some reason found to introduce an impeachment resolution, the South Carolina congressman said Tuesday on MSNBCs The Ed Show. These Republicans have decided that this president must have an asterisk by his name after he leaves office, irrespective of whether or not he gets convicted. It is their plan to introduce an impeachment resolution.
He continued, is to put an asterisk next to this first African-American president in the history of the country to put an asterisk next to his name when the history books are written.
Clyburn, a high-ranking member of Democratic leadership in the House, argued that Republicans are aiming for impeachment as a way to keep the country focused on foolishness rather than on what we need to do in order to move an agenda forward.
As far as what will spur the call to impeach, Clyburn pointed to the heated debate on immigration reform.
Obama has warned Republican leaders in Congress that if they do not act quickly on a plan to reform immigration laws, he will issue executive orders aimed at changing the system. Speaker John Boehner has said that executive actions will poison the well on any attempts to reform the laws.
Obama Administration Immigration Policy
In June 2012, Senator Jon Kyl mentioned impeachment when discussing the Obama Administration policy on immigration. He said on the Bill Bennettradio show, “if itâs bad enough and if shenanigans involved in it, then of course impeachment is always a possibility. But I donât think at this point anybody is talking about that”.
In August 2013, Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma responded to a questioner in a town hall meeting, who had asserted that Obama was failing to carry out his constitutional responsibilities, by saying that “you have to establish the criteria that would qualify for proceedings against the president… and that’s called impeachment”. Coburn added, “I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’, but I think you’re getting perilously close”. Coburn did not specify what grounds he felt would support impeachment, but NBC News noted that Coburn “mentioned that he believes Department of Homeland Security officials have told career USCIS employees to ‘ignore’ background checks for immigrants”. Coburn mentioned no evidence that substantiated his belief.
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Trumps Former Secretary Of Veterans Affairs Says He Would Vote To Remove The President From Office
David J. Shulkin, the former secretary of veterans affairs under President Trump, said on Monday that he would vote to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office if he were still in the cabinet, saying that Mr. Trump has demonstrated that he is a threat to the nation.
Theres no doubt I believe that this is the time to put the countrys interest first, and I do not believe the president should any longer be serving, Dr. Shulkin said in an interview. I believe that this is an extraordinary time of danger and challenge to the country, and I would support removal from office.
Dr. Shulkin, who said he would also support impeachment but worried it was not an efficient enough mechanism, went further than most other former Trump cabinet secretaries have gone in calling for the presidents removal from office. John F. Kelly, who served as Mr. Trumps secretary of homeland security before becoming White House chief of staff, has also said he would support invoking the 25th Amendment while other Trump cabinet veterans like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and former Attorney General William P. Barr have offered scathing criticism without explicitly calling for Mr. Trumps removal.
Trump’s Former Chief Of Staff Is On Capitol Hill To Meet With The Impeachment Team
From CNN’s Kristin Wilson
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters that the Democrats opening argument was pretty much what I was expecting and that its hard to make a good case when you have an unconstitutional process.
He said hes spoken with former President Trump on a regular basis but had not spoken with him about the opening arguments at the Senate trial.
When asked why he was on Capitol Hill, he said, I’m just coming over to meet with the impeachment team and said that he will be with them sporadically over the course of the trial.
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But It Would Be A Boneheaded Move For Numerous Reasons
When Congress heads off on its upcoming five-week recess, some Republicans, at town halls with constituents, will bring up the “I” word: impeachment. Barack Obama, they’ll say, needs to be removed from office. The reasons, in their view, are many: Benghazi. The IRS. An inability to control the Mexican border, to name but three. The constitutional standard for removal from office in Article II, Section 4 is “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” and to the far right, Obama more than qualifies.
Talking tough about impeachment is what constituents in gerrymandered Republican districts want to hear. It’s good red-meat politics. But back here on planet Earth, the reality is this: There’s about as much chance of Obama being removed from office as there is of Nancy Pelosi throwing the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. It’s just not going to happen. The probability is literally zero.
Here are some numbers: A CNN poll last week said one third of Americans want Obama impeached. Just a liberal media poll, you say? Well, a Fox News survey last week said the same thing. And that one third just happens to coincide more or less with the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Republicans. Fact is, vast majorities of independent voters and Democrats oppose removing the president from office.
So the Republican dream of Obama being forced from office making Joe Biden the 45th president simply isn’t going to happen.
President’s Constitutional Duty To Faithfully Execute The Laws
On December 3, 2013, the House Judiciary committee held a hearing formally titled “The President’s Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws”, which some participants and observers viewed as an attempt to begin justifying impeachment proceedings. Asked if the hearing was about impeachment, the committee chairman responded that it was not, adding, “I didn’t mention impeachment nor did any of the witnesses in response to my questions at the Judiciary Committee hearing.” Contrary to his claims however, a witness did mention impeachment rather blatantly. Partisan Georgetown University law professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz said, âA check on executive lawlessness is impeachmentâ as he accused Obama of âclaim the right of the king to essentially stand above the law.â
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The State Department Labels Cuba A State Sponsor Of Terrorism In A Last
The State Department has designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism, a last-minute foreign policy stroke that will complicate the incoming Biden administrations plans for dealing with Havana.
With this action, we will once again hold Cubas government accountable and send a clear message: The Castro regime must end its support for international terrorism and subversion of U.S. justice, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement.
The New York Times reported last month that Mr. Pompeo was weighing the move and had a plan to do so on his desk. The action, announced with just over a week left in the Trump administration, reverses a step taken in 2015 after President Barack Obama restored U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba, calling its decades of isolation an archaic relic of the Cold War.
Once in office, President Trump acted swiftly to undermine Mr. Obamas policy of openness, which Republicans said Havana forfeited by failing to implement promised reforms and continuing to crack down on political dissent. The designation requires a finding that a country has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism, according to the State Department. The move automatically triggers U.S. sanctions against Cuba, including limits on U.S. foreign assistance, export controls and financial restrictions.
What Did Trump Say About Obamacare
President Trump has been actively trying to repeal the healthcare law since he campaigned for the 2016 presidential election.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to revoke Obamacare because it’s been an “unlawful failure.”
A brief filed in June asked the court to strike down the Affordable Care Act, arguing it became invalid after Congress axed parts of it.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: “President Trump and the Republicans campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the coronavirus crisis is an act of unfathomable cruelty.
“If President Trump gets his way, 130 million Americans with pre-existing conditions will lose the ACAs lifesaving protections and 23 million Americans will lose their health coverage entirely.
“There is no legal justification and no moral excuse for the Trump Administrations disastrous efforts to take away Americans health care.”
Republicans also argue that some people are better off without Obamacare due to the fact that it does not cover those who need it most.
According to the provisions, people who earn just slightly too much to qualify for federal premium subsidies, particularly early retirees and people in their 50s and early 60s who are self-employed are not covered.
Trump endorsed a replacement to Obamacare in 2017 but fell short of passing the Republican-controlled Congress.
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Trump’s Rhetoric On Impeachment In 2014 Becomes Relevant Anew
In his unhinged letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday, Donald Trump told the congressional leader, “You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!” The president went on to suggest via Twitter this morning that he’s concerned about impeachment being made “trivial.”
He appears to have arrived at these concerns quite recently.
It wasn’t long ago, for example, that Trump wanted Pelosi to impeach George W. Bush for having launched the Iraq war. “He got us into the war with lies!” Trump said in 2008.
His attitude toward impeaching Barack Obama was even more cavalier. “Are you allowed to impeach a president for gross incompetence?” Trump wrote on Twitter in June 2014.
Several months later, after Republicans took complete control over both houses of Congress, Trump appeared on Fox & Friends and was asked what he’d like to see the new GOP majorities do. Trump replied that he wanted Republicans to impeach the Democratic president.
“Do you think Obama seriously wants to be impeached and go through what Bill Clinton did? He would be a mess. He would be thinking about nothing but. It would be a horror show for him. It would be an absolute embarrassment. It would go down on his record permanently.”
It wasn’t altogether clear what it was Obama did that Trump saw as worthy of impeachment; Trump simply seemed to like the idea of trying to rattle Obama on a personal level.
Does this sound like anyone else you know?
Donald Trump Claims Republicans ‘never Even Thought Of Impeaching’ Barack Obama History Tells A Different Story
President Donald Trump claimed that Republicans “never even thought of impeaching” Barack Obama, despite the record showing that many spoke of doing so over multiple issues.
In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump called on Republicans to get tougher and said that while he thinks Democrats are bad politicians with lousy policies he respects that they stick together. And, Trump said, Democrats are vicious.
“They’re much more vicious. We would never do a thing like this,” Trump told Hannity of the current House impeachment inquiry over the Ukraine affair in which the president is accused of soliciting the help of a foreign government in the 2020 election.
” could’ve impeached Obama for the IRS scandal, they could’ve impeached him for the guns or whatever, where guns went all over the place and people got killed with guns, Fast and Furious. They could’ve impeached him for many different things. They didn’t impeach him. They never even thought of impeaching him.”
In fact, Republicans in Congress did raise the impeachment of Obama multiple times.
In 2010, California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa called the alleged White House job offer to ex-Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak if he dropped out of a Senate primary “a crime, and could be impeachable” for Obama, Fox News reported.
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