Y’know, you really would think the GOP of NO would have learned a permanent lesson when they tried, unsuccessfully, to impeach President Clinton back in the’90′s. Alas, stupidity has no time limit and they are at it again, this time wanting to impeach President Obama. The New York Times caught the idiotic story…… Representative Kerry Bentivolio, a freshman Republican from Michigan, has a legislative dream. It is not to balance the federal budget, or find a way to help his ailing state or even take away money from the federal health care program, a goal that has so animated many other Republicans this summer. Rather, Mr. Bentivolio told constituents, it is to put in motion the impeachment of President Obama. “If I could write that bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true,” he said this month. Mr. Bentivolio may be lacking in his understanding of the technical details of the impeachment process — he has retained experts and historians to help him with that, he said — but he is hardly the only one with this desire. While many members of Congress have used their August break to engage in conversations about immigration policy, the federal budget and the impending implementation of the Affordable Care Act, some Republicans have taken the opportunity to raise the specter of — if not quite the grounds for — presidential impeachment. The last sentence is the thing, as any grounds they have for impeachment are, at best, thin as watered-down grits and as tasteless. I truly think they are engaged in a process of reaching for the cheese the moon is made of, in this exercise in futility that even the Speaker of the House is quite sensibly against. As for the President’s men, they are not the least worried, in fact they are saying, bring it on. Anything that proves the unintelligent silliness of the Repubbles is grist in the mill of the coming mid-terms. Really, how can they be so stupid? I could wish that the Constitution spelled out the nature of impeachable offenses better, but I doubt seriously that a majority of House members would agree on any one offense on which to impeach the President. I checked Wikipedia and found this. In the United States, impeachment can occur both at the federal and state level. The Constitution defines impeachment at the federal level and limits impeachment to “The President, Vice President, and all civil officers of the United States” who may be impeached and removed only for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”.[9] Several commentators have suggested that Congress alone may decide for itself what constitutes a “high crime or misdemeanor” especially sinceNixon v. United States stated that the Supreme Court did not have the authority to determine whether the Senate properly “tried” a defendant.[citation needed] In 1970, then-House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford defined the criterion as he saw it: “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”[10] Four years later, Gerald Ford would become president when President Richard Nixon resigned under the threat of impeachment.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Aug 2013 18:53:47 +0000