Jonathan Chait says that the GOP wants a President Hillary Clinton:
“Comprehensive immigration reform has suffered a slow, painful death for months on end. For a while, it seemed Republicans might instead try to force Democrats to accept the quarter-of-a-loaf compromise of a Dream Act, which would legalize illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children (and, thus, personally blameless.) Even that gambit foundered. The worst-case scenario then seemed to be that Republicans would do nothing at all to address the broken immigration system or the gulf of mistrust among Latino and Asian voters.”
“Now they have settled upon a course of action even worse than the worst-case scenario.”
Dana Milbank on the logic of the House Republicans, such as it is:
After conservatives on Thursday brought down House Speaker John Boehner’s bill to address the border crisis, the new House Republican leadership team issued a joint statement declaring that President Obama should fix the problem himself.
“There are numerous steps the president can and should be taking right now, without the need for congressional action,” the leadership quartet proclaimed, “to secure our borders and ensure these children are returned swiftly and safely to their countries.”
Just the day before, House Republicans had voted to sue Obama for using his executive authority. They called him lawless, a usurper, a monarch, a tyrant — all for postponing deadlines in the implementation of Obamacare. Now they were begging him to take executive action to compensate for their own inability to act — even though, in this case, accelerating the deportation of thousands of unaccompanied children coming from Central America would likely require Obama to ignore a 2008 law.
I personally guarantee that whatever Obama does in his executive authority with respect to immigration will be the basis for impeachment. It is just so fracking predictable.
Jonathan Turley looks at the legalities of impeachment.
People pushing for President Obama’s impeachment have cited rationales ranging from the border crisis to Benghazi to Obamacare to the dismantling of “our constitutional republic, our national security, our electoral system, our economic strength, our rights and liberties.” In other words, anything goes. This echoes the characterization by Gerald Ford, who as House minority leader in 1970 made the ill-considered statement that “an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” (This interpretation was, not surprisingly, part of a frivolous effort to impeach Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, whom Ford denounced for espousing “liberal opinions,” for defending the “filthy” Swedish film “I Am Curious (Yellow)” and for writing a magazine article that “praises the lusty, lurid, and risque along with the social protest of left-wing folk singers.”) …
But Congress’s exclusive power to impeach does not license it to abuse that power, any more than the Supreme Court’s final say on laws gives it license to deliver arbitrary rulings. The framers carefully defined the grounds for impeachment as “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” — language with British legal precedent. They clearly did not want removal of the president subject to congressional whim. Indeed, they rejected the addition of “maladministration” after James Madison cautioned that “so vague a term will be equivalent to a tenure during pleasure of the Senate.”
You should read it all, for Turley concludes that Obama will not be impeached, first because he’s not committed an impeachable offense and second because it wouldn’t make political sense. Ah, but it made no political sense for the GOP to vote to deport DREAMers, but they just did. They will vote to impeach Obama. I guarantee it.