“No One To Blame But Themselves”: The GOP’s Impeachment Dilemma Will Only Get Worse
Today John Boehner declared that any talk of Republicans impeaching President Obama is a sinister plot originating in the White House, from which so many other sinister plots have come. “It’s all a scam started by Democrats at the White House,” he said. “This whole talk about impeachment is coming from the president’s own staff and coming from Democrats on Capitol Hill. Why? Because they’re trying to rally their own people to give money and show up in this year’s elections.” Which is partially true. Democrats do want to talk about impeachment, and it does help them raise money (though while an actual impeachment would certainly get Democratic voters to the polls in November, it’s much less likely that just talking about it will do so). But that’s only part of the story.
Boehner and other Republican leaders are now trying to walk an impossible tightrope. On one hand, they’re arguing that they have no interest in impeaching the president — they know that it would be a political catastrophe if they did — and any suggestion to the contrary is nothing but Democratic calumny. On the other hand, they’re arguing that Obama is a lawless tyrant who is trampling on the Constitution. If that contradiction has put them in a difficult situation, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Like so many of their problems, this one has its roots in the uncontrollable Tea Party beast that they nurtured but can’t control. It’s true that the only prominent Republicans explicitly calling for impeachment are ones like Michele Bachmann, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), or Sarah Palin. But you can see the quandary in people like Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was on Fox News Sunday this week, and when Chris Wallace tried to pin him down to say that Republicans wouldn’t impeachment Obama, Scalise wouldn’t do it.
It’s probably because Scalise knows that impeachment isn’t supported just by his party’s fringe. According to a YouGov poll taken earlier this month, 89 percent of Republicans think “Barack Obama has exceeded the limits of authority granted a President by the US Constitution,” and 68 percent think there is “justification for Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against President Obama at this time.” Even when given a number of options including “President Obama has abused his powers as president which rise to the level of impeachable offenses under the Constitution, but he should not be impeached,” 63 percent still said he ought to be impeached. A CNN poll found a smaller number of Republicans saying Obama should be impeached, but still a majority of 57 percent.
So the idea that Boehner characterizes as a crazy Democratic slander is the majority position among Republican voters. And they didn’t get the idea from nowhere. They got it because the people they trust — Republican politicians and conservative media figures — have been telling them for years, but with particularly ferocity in the last few months, that Barack Obama is a lawless tyrant who is trampling on the Constitution. They’ve been hearing this not just from the Sean Hannitys and Steve Kings of the world, but from every Republican, up to and including the GOP congressional leadership, on a daily basis. Of course those Republican voters think he should be impeached. It’s absurd for people like Boehner to turn around and say, “Whoa now, who’s thinking of impeachment? That’s just Democrats saying that.”
And consider the odd situation in which that leaves the President. As much as he has been under attack from Republicans over executive authority, he has a political incentive to bait Republicans into talking more about impeachment, which would both build pressure for it within the GOP and force them to deny it to the media. The best way for him to do so is to take more unilateral action on issues like immigration. That would incense Republicans, who would then rush to the cameras to decry his lawlessness, which would lead journalists to ask them whether they’re going to impeach him, which would lead them to tie themselves in knots denying it. Obama would get both the policy results he wants and the political benefit of making his opponents look like they’re about to drag the country into a repeat of the farce of 1998.
So yes, the talk of impeachment is in part a plot by the White House. But they’re only exploiting the pressure that exists within the GOP — pressure that John Boehner and the rest of the party leadership helped create. And if you think you’ve seen Republicans squirming uncomfortably over the question up until now, just you wait.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, July 29, 2014
“A Year Of Living Negatively”: The Tea Party’s View Takes Precedence Over Majority Opinion Among Republicans.
Republicans feel good about this fall’s election even though their party is sharply divided and its brand is badly tainted.
The House GOP last week elected a balanced ticket of leaders in a relatively harmonious process. Nonetheless, the party’s right still complained that its voices were not heard.
And a party leadership that thought it had quelled the tea party rebellion faces a runoff in Mississippi on Tuesday that will end either in a victory for the insurgent challenger or in claims that the establishment candidate prevailed only because Democrats, particularly African Americans, crossed into the Republican primary to save him.
Is it any wonder that the GOP’s governing game plan for the rest of the year is to do as little as possible? Since the party can’t agree to anything that would pass muster with President Obama and the Democratic Senate, it will bet that Obama’s low poll ratings will be enough for Republicans to make gains in House races and, potentially, give them control of the Senate.
All of this is why 2014 will be the year of living negatively.
The prospect of months of attacks and more attacks reflects the depth of disillusionment with Washington. This is the best thing Republicans have going for them, but it might also provide Democrats with their clearest path to holding the Senate. Consider the findings of last week’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
The number that got the most attention was the president’s depressed 41 percent approval rating. But the survey also found that only 29 percent of those surveyed had a positive view of the Republican Party while 38 percent had a positive view of the Democrats. Democratic candidates have remained competitive in many key races because so many voters find the GOP alternative unpalatable.
The survey also showed that Republican divisions are not the invention of right-wing talk-show hosts or bloggers. Republicans who support the tea party are well to the right of others in their party. As NBC’s First Read reported, 68 percent of tea party Republicans said that immigration hurts the United States, compared with only 47 percent of non-tea party Republicans and 42 percent of all Americans. And a PRRI/Brookings survey (with which I was involved) found that while 41 percent of tea party members favored identifying and deporting illegal immigrants, only 26 percent of non-tea party Republicans preferred this option.
By a 74 percent to 23 percent margin in the NBC/Journal poll, tea party Republicans disapproved of requiring companies to reduce greenhouse gases, “even if it would mean higher utility bills for consumers.” By contrast, 57 percent of Americans and 50 percent of non-tea party Republicans backed the idea.
The Republican congressional leadership thus continues to be caught between an aspiration to appeal to middle-ground voters and a fear, reinforced by Eric Cantor’s recent loss, that efforts to do so will be punished by the party’s right, which plays an outsize role in low-turnout primaries. On policy — notably on immigration — this often means that the tea party’s view takes precedence over majority opinion among Republicans.
In electing Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) as majority leader over the more conservative Rep. Raúl Labrador (Idaho), House Republicans were actually trying to avoid ideology altogether. To replace Cantor (Va.), they picked a pragmatist focused on winning elections and an extrovert known for making friends across factional lines. Policy ambition is not McCarthy’s calling card.
The victory of Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana as whip pleased many conservatives and Southerners, but not all — and especially not the most ardently conservative bloggers and talk-show hosts who influence rank-and-file tea party opinion. Erick Erickson of the RedState blog, for example, accused Scalise of having worked “behind the scenes to marginalize conservatives.” Rep. Justin Amash, a young libertarian from Michigan, said the result of the leadership races showed that the House GOP “unfortunately hasn’t heard the message loud enough.”
There will be more loud commotion on Tuesday in Mississippi’s Republican runoff between the tea party’s Chris McDaniel and Sen. Thad Cochran, a six-term incumbent. McDaniel is seen as having the momentum, but his supporters are already attacking Cochran’s campaign for encouraging Democrats to participate in the Republican contest.
Cochran, a McDaniel e-mail insisted, “is so desperate to keep his seat that he’s going to use Democrats to steal the Republican primary.”
So the next stop in the battle for the Republican soul could see either a victory that emboldens the tea party — or a defeat that will be blamed on Democrats and infuriate the movement.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 22, 2014
“More Of The Orange Man”: Boehner “Leads” By Anticipating Exactly How Much Rope His Caucus Will Give Him
House Republicans are having them some leadership elections today, with Kevin McCarthy considered sure to overcome Raul Labrador for the defenestrated Eric Cantor’s Majority Leader position, while three members (Steve Scalise, Peter Roskam and Marlin Stutzman) compete for McCarthy’s Whip position. Scalise, currently chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee, is considered the front-runner in that race.
But the consequence of Cantor’s demise that hasn’t made much news is that it will likely keep John Boehner in place for another two years. Carl Hulse of the New York Times has that story:
Significant uncertainty had remained about whether the man who has led the House since 2011 would run again for speaker, given his frustrations with his own members and some of their very public frustration with him. Allies said Mr. Boehner himself might not have known what he would ultimately do.
But Mr. Cantor’s abrupt departure from the leadership quickly put to rest any talk of Mr. Boehner’s retirement.
Members of Mr. Boehner’s circle said they immediately made clear to the speaker that he could no longer even consider stepping down, since doing so would leave the fractious House Republican conference without its top two leaders and with an extremely short list of colleagues able to fill that void.
The day after Mr. Cantor’s loss, Mr. Boehner told his colleagues that he intended to run again for speaker, and the declaration was met by many with relief. The shake-up has strengthened his hand in many respects, giving him stronger control of the agenda.
“Now he really is the indispensable man,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said.
Yeah, but one who often “leads” by anticipating exactly how much rope his caucus will give him. I’m sure the president will be thrilled to learn that absent some electoral tsunami in November, the Orange Man, smelling slightly of nicotine and brimstone, will be sitting behind him for yet another State of the Union address next January.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington MOnthly Political Animal, June 19, 2014
“Bringing The Shutdown Logic Home”: The Government Shutdown Crowd Has A New Target, John Boehner
The long knives are out for John Boehner on the right – again. National Journal’s Tim Alberta has a must-read today on a conservative plot to oust the House speaker next year … or put the squeeze on House Majority Leader Eric Cantor … or something.
According to Alberta, the frustrated right numbers in the “several dozen,” with the ringleaders all hailing from the House Liberty Caucus, from which came the core of the dozen GOP’ers who voted against Boehner for speaker last year. Alberta writes:
The conservatives’ exasperation with leadership is well known. And now, in discreet dinners at the Capitol Hill Club and in winding, hypothetical-laced email chains, they’re trying to figure out what to do about it. Some say it’s enough to coalesce behind — and start whipping votes for — a single conservative leadership candidate. Others want to cut a deal with Majority Leader Eric Cantor: We’ll back you for speaker if you promise to bring aboard a conservative lieutenant.
But there’s a more audacious option on the table, according to conservatives involved in the deliberations. They say between 40 and 50 members have already committed verbally to electing a new speaker. If those numbers hold, organizers say, they could force Boehner to step aside as speaker in late November, when the incoming GOP conference meets for the first time, by showing him that he won’t have the votes to be reelected in January.
They’re not gunning for Boehner alone. They’re pissed at Eric Cantor because he moved the Medicare “doc fix” through on a voice vote a few weeks back, a move which had the pragmatic virtue of passing needed legislation without forcing members to go on the record casting a vote which could have proved potentially troublesome in a primary. In short, Alberta writes, “conservatives find fault with the entire leadership team.”
So what’s the plan? They haven’t found someone to run against Boehner yet (conservatives like Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling and Ohio Rep. Steve Scalise aren’t interested, Alberta reports) and while “privately they define success as vaulting one of their own into any of the top three leadership spots,” they also tell Alberta that scenarios like Republican Study Committee Chairman Steve Scalise running for whip – which is, you know, one of the top three leadership spots – “would hardly qualify as the splash conservatives are determined to make.”
In short conservatives are all riled up and determined to make a splash; they’re eyeing a nuclear option – blocking Boehner from another term as speaker – but don’t have a clear end-game beyond that. But they’re pretty sure one will materialize when their opponents inevitably fold in the face of their show of will. They’re definitely going to make a splash because they’re really, really determined.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should – it’s the government shutdown logic transferred to the Republican civil war. The right wound itself up about Obamacare and then shuttered the government without a clear plan other than that Obama was going to inevitably fold in the face of their Keyzer Soze-like superior show of will. However it turned out, they were going to get something big out of the whole affair because they’d tried really, really hard. (“I don’t think our conference will be amenable for settling for a colletion of things after we’ve fought so hard,” New Jersey GOP Rep. Scott Garrett said at the time.) How’d all that turn out?
The tea party right’s problem here is that they echo chamber themselves into badly overestimating their leverage and end up with little more than egg on their collective faces. See the paltry dozen votes they managed against Boehner last time, for example, or the outcome of the government shutdown.
We’ll see. Maybe the wingers really will be able to produce 50 anti-Boehner votes and shut down the House. Or maybe they’re basting too long in their own tough and angry talk. Again.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, April 10, 2014
“The Presidency Comes With Executive Power, Deal With It”: Obama’s Just Doing What He’s Empowered To Do
In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama vowed to act on his own if Congress did not do its part. Republicans duly took the bait. “We don’t have a monarchy in this country,” said Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. “The abuse of power by the administration has only become more brazen,” said Senator Ted Cruz.
Obama has unsheathed the sword of executive power, and yet rather than use it to smite his foes, he seems intent on clipping hedges. He says he will raise the minimum wage for a few thousand employees of federal contractors, tinker with the pension system, trim red tape, cajole business leaders to fund pre-kindergarten education, and do something unspecified to help stop gun violence.
Obama begged Congress for help far more often than he vowed to go it alone. Obama’s significant acts of executive power—the Libya intervention, the refusal to defend DOMA before the Supreme Court, non-enforcement of the immigration law against certain groups, climate regulation, NSA surveillance, recess appointments, executive privilege, and so on—lie in the past.
So we have a paradox. In his first term, Obama humbly beseeched Congress for help and sang the virtues of bipartisanship while resorting to unilateral action whenever he needed to. Today, he announces his defiance of Congress yet seems uninterested in using his newly acknowledged executive powers to, for example, shut Guantanamo Bay or raise the debt ceiling on his own.
Be that as it may, it is worth understanding what is at stake in these debates. We all learned in school that the founders feared executive power and so gave policy-making authority to Congress. In fact, the founders feared a too-powerful Congress as well, and they sought to create a strong executive. But the idea that Congress makes law and the president executes it—and any deviation from this pattern is tyranny—is burned into our political culture.
This system of separation of powers was cumbersome from the start. The country did well in its first few decades probably because state governments led the way, and state government structure was far less rigid than federal structure, which finally collapsed with the Civil War. When the communications and transportation revolutions created national markets and new opportunities and threats in foreign relations, it was finally clear that the federal separation-of-powers system could not manage policy at a national level.
The problem was that Congress was an enormously clumsy institution. Its numerous members fiercely advanced their deeply parochial interests. Policies of great importance for one section of the country, or one group of people, could not be embodied in legislation unless logrolling could be arranged, which was slow, difficult, and vulnerable to corruption. As a public, deliberative body, Congress could not react swiftly to changing events, nor act secretly when secrecy was called for.
No one held a constitutional convention to replace the eighteenth-century constitution with a twentieth-century one. Instead, political elites acting through the party system adjusted the government structure on their own. Congress created gigantic regulatory agencies and tasked the president to lead them. Congress also acquiesced as presidents asserted authority over foreign policy. The Supreme Court initially balked at the legislative delegations but eventually was bullied into submission; it hardly ever objected to the president’s dominance over foreign affairs.
This was not a smooth process. The rise of executive power sometimes hurt important interests and always rubbed against the republican sensibilities that Americans inherited from the founders. From time to time, Congress reaped political benefits from thwarting the president. But today Congress reacts rather than leads. It investigates allegations of corruption in the executive branch. It holds hearings to torment executive officials. It certainly doesn’t give the executive the budget he always wants, or pass every new law that he believes that he needs. But existing laws and customs almost always give the president the power he needs to govern. And when they don’t, Congress will sooner or later give him the power he wants. Witness the Dodd-Frank Act and the Affordable Care Act—two massive expansions of executive power.
In monarchies, the official position was that the king made policy but everyone understood that his ministers did. In our system, the official story is that Congress makes policy and the president implements it—such is the inertia of history. But the reality is that the president both makes policy and implements it, subject to vague parameters set down by Congress and to its carping from the sidelines. Presidents can defy the official story and assert the reality if they want. That is what the George W. Bush administration did, to its eventual sorrow. In hindsight, the broad assertions of executive power by Bush administration lawyers in signing statements, executive orders, and secret memos were naïve. They described, with only some exaggeration, the actual workings of the government, but their account conflicted with the official narrative and thus played into the hands of critics, who could invoke tyranny, dictatorship, and that old standby, the “imperial presidency.”
Democratic presidents have been shrewder. Bill Clinton and Obama have been just as muscular in their use of executive power as Ronald Reagan and Bush, but they resisted the temptation to brandish the orb and scepter. Whereas Republican presidents cite their constitutional powers as often as they can, Democratic presidents avoid doing so except as a last resort, preferring instead to rely on statutes, torturing them when necessary to extract the needed interpretation. Thus did Obama’s lawyers claim that the military intervention in Libya did not violate the War Powers Act because the U.S. bombing campaign did not amount to “hostilities” (the word in the statute). A more honest legal theory—one that does not require such a strained interpretation of a word—is that the War Powers Act infringes on the president’s military powers, but a theory like that would have provoked howls of protest.
In most cases, lawyers do not need to resort to such measures because Congress has already granted authority. The president’s power to raise the minimum wage comes from the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, which, in typically broad language, permits the president to set contract terms with federal contractors so as to promote “efficiency.” Far from being a bold assertion of executive power, this is the type of humdrum presidential action that takes place every day.
Congress gave the president the power to determine contract terms because Congress did not want to—practically speaking could not—negotiate those terms itself every time the U.S. government entered a contract. This principle explains why Congress gives the executive branch enormous discretion to determine health, education, environmental, and financial policy. Congress directed the financial regulators to implement the Volcker Rule, but it would be entirely up to those regulators to make the rule meaningful or toothless. Nor can Congress block Obama’s decision to effectively implement the Dream Act—which was not passed by Congress—by not enforcing immigration laws against those who would have benefited from the act.
Meanwhile, the founders’ anxieties about executive tyranny have proven erroneous. The president is kept in check by elections, the party system, the press, popular opinion, courts, a political culture that is deeply suspicious of his motives, term limits, and the sheer vastness of the bureaucracy which he can only barely control. He does not always do the right thing, of course, but presidents generally govern from the middle of the political spectrum.
Obama’s assertion of unilateral executive authority is just routine stuff. He follows in the footsteps of his predecessors on a path set out by Congress. And well should he. If you want a functioning government—one that protects citizens from criminals, terrorists, the climatic effects of greenhouse gas emissions, poor health, financial manias, and the like—then you want a government led by the president.
By: Eric Posner, The New Republic, February 3, 2014
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