Thinking Out Loud: The Folly of Suing and Impeaching President Obama

To his credit, House Speaker John Boehner is against any effort by Republicans to impeach President Obama for violating his constitutional duty to “faithfully execute” (enforce) the laws of the land. Granted, it is unarguable that the president has violated the Constitution by repeatedly refusing to enforce laws, or sections of laws, that he doesn’t agree with. It is also unarguable that he has violated the Constitution by amending provisions of several laws, which the Constitution says only Congress has the authority to do. And, ironically, most of the president’s unconstitutional revisions are to his signature legislative achievement, Obamacare.

But Boehner is among the House Republicans who supported the recent House vote to sue the president for the unconstitutional actions outlined above.

Both a lawsuit and impeachment are a bad idea.

Impeachment is actually pure folly because even if the House manages to impeach President Obama, the Democratic-controlled Senate would never convict him. And do Republicans remember the last attempt by a Republican-controlled House to impeach a Democratic president who could rely on a Democratic-controlled Senate to rescue him? The political circumstances, if not the causes, of Bill Clinton’s impeachment and any attempt to impeach President Obama are very similar.

As would be the aftermath. Republicans took a beating in public opinion polls after voting to impeach President Clinton because the American people considered it a purely partisan, vindictive waste of time (and taxpayer dollars). The same would be true with President Obama.

For similar reasons a lawsuit is also a bad idea. Again, the public would consider it one more example of the dysfunction of Washington, and right or wrong (mostly wrong), a wasteful, political act of spite caused by the GOP’s blindly ideological dislike of the president.

But, for Republicans, impeachment and a lawsuit against the president are mostly a bad idea because they would be a distraction. Republicans should be doing everything possible to focus the American people’s collective mind on the anemic economy (GDP growth in 2014 is 1 percent), high unemployment, staggering national debt ($17 trillion, meaning every American owes $61,000), and the many foreign and domestic disasters presided over by the Obama administration and its Democratic allies in Congress. Think Benghazi, the IRS, the VA hospital scandal, the border crisis, Syria, Iraq, a revanchist Russia, and more.

Suing or impeaching the president, to which the liberal media will happily devote its full attention, will shift the public focus away from Obama’s and the Democratic Party’s ineptness at the worst possible time. There are just three months until the 2014 mid-term elections, and most opinion polls show the Republicans will easily retain the House and might even capture the Senate.

If they don’t do anything stupid.