Some GOP members seek to impeach Obama

Amid the partisan controversy in Congress, some Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives say they will try to impeach President Obama.

Do they believe that Obama is guilty of what the Constitution calls “high crimes and misdemeanors?”  Do they believe they can be successful?

The answers to both questions is “no.”

They want to use the impeachment process for purely political purposes, mostly as a way of tying up the House so it cannot do any other business, like paying for Obamacare. 

And they seem to believe they could avoid any blame for bringing the unfunded federal government to a halt, because the Congress would be engaged in the serious business of trying to toss the president out of office.

Surely, the Founding Fathers did not mean that impeachment – the bringing of charges by the House – or conviction by the U.S. Senate should be used as a political tactic. 

It was intended to allow a president who was a criminal or who violated the express terms of the Constitution to be removed.  But it has never been used for the intended purposes.

Obama could find himself in line after the two presidents who were impeached, because a majority in the House thought they were usurpers and barely had the right to hold the office.

Andrew Johnson, who moved up from the vice presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, was the first president to be impeached.  He was a Democrat, chosen by the Republican Lincoln to create a national unity ticket.

His problem was that Congress was dominated by Republicans who disliked his willingness to go easy on the South after the Civil War and to deny help for the newly freed slaves.  They saw him as having distorted Lincoln’s legacy.

So the Republicans cooked up a law that probably was unconstitutional and then impeached him for disobeying it.  At the end of the Senate trial, he was not convicted because seven Republicans, including Maine’s William Pitt Fessenden, refused to go along with the ploy.

Bill Clinton was impeached by a Republican-controlled House for his problems in telling the truth about his sexual encounters.  Once again, the Senate did not convict, this time with a few Republicans, including Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, refusing to going along with the misuse of the impeachment power.

Though elected twice, Clinton, like Johnson, was seen by the GOP as a president who should not have held the office.   The presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had set the government on a clear conservative course, which Clinton had diverted by his elections. 

Congress tried to take control of the government, just as it has with Johnson, by dumping a president in whom it had no confidence.  Fortunately, there were enough people in Congress who thought the Constitution was more important than partisan games.

But Clinton showed the ploy was not entirely a wasted effort.  He sought common ground with the Republicans on some issues, partly because he was less liberal than many had thought and partly to appease them.  That’s pretty clearly the reason he went along with changing the name of the capital’s airport to honor Reagan instead of Washington.

Obama, too, is seen by conservative Republicans as almost an accidental president.  After the Democratic Party’s losses to the tea party in 2010, Obama should not have been re-elected two years later.  But he was.

Perhaps those GOP House members now seeking impeachment believe they can get Obama to yield on continuing with Obamacare and appease them to avoid nasty impeachment proceedings. 

The two historic impeachment proceedings and the current talk of one against Obama have something in common.  A disciplined majority in at least one house of Congress seeks to express its lack of confidence in the president.

In other words, the opposition would use impeachment in the same way the opposition in a parliamentary democracy uses a so-called “no confidence vote.”  It can embarrass the prime minister and, if successful, can cause a new election.

Of course, the United States does not have a parliamentary system.  But that may not stop some members of Congress from using impeachment to paralyze the president for the remainder of his term, as it did for Johnson, or to adopt some of their proposals, as it did with Clinton.

Still, it is unlikely that the latest impeachment talk will get very far.  The Republican House leadership seems to want to get on with a direct legislative struggle with Obama, probably fearing the political fall-out from misuse of the impeachment process.