of impeachment” require just a simple majority for approval. The historical rarity of impeachment owes to its gravity, not its difficulty.
Besides, despite the GOP’s seething intramural divisions, there is nigh unanimous revulsion when it comes to Obama’s agenda. In fact, even Democrats—especially those facing tough reelection races in the fall—have taken to avoiding joint appearances with the president. His poll numbers have tanked. Hope-and-Change delirium has given way to the hard reality that we really can’t keep our health insurance policies and our doctors if we like them. The public grows angrier with each insurance cancellation notice—or is it, each million cancellation notices?
Even Obama sympathizers at the Washington Post, putting their best spin on the matter, concede that 21 million people are out of work, not the 10 million grudgingly acknowledged by the administration.2 In fact, the real unemployment rate of about 13 percent is double the rate routinely reported by the media.3 By December 2013, the population of Americans over the age of sixteen without a full-time job had climbed to a staggering 92 million—far exceeding the total population of Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy.4 In a nation that has grown by nearly 10 million people since Obama took office, 11 million fewer people are working today than in 2009—marking a nadir in American workforce participation not seen since the Jimmy Carter malaise.5
Remarkably, prominent liberal law professors—a core Obama constituency—have even begun speaking up about the administration’s abuses of power. George Washington University’s Jonathan Turley describes Obama’s imperialism as the “uber-presidency,” conceding in congressional testimony that the president has enveloped the nation in “the most serious constitutional crisis . . . of my lifetime.” (Yes, Professor Turley did live through Nixon.) In more recent testimony he added, “The president has in fact exceeded his authority in a way that is creating a destabilizing influence in a three-branch system.”6 Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz has slammed the Justice Department for its “outrageous” and “selective prosecution” of a conservative Obama critic—a case that reportedly put Professor Dershowitz in mind of Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s infamous secret police chief, who said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”7
The alarm is way overdue, but it is not surprising. So rampant are President Obama’s violations of law and derelictions of duty that it has become a chore to summarize them. But let’s give it a shot.
The president has assiduously ignored the chief executive’s fundamental constitutional obligation to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”8 He has repeatedly violated the oath that the Constitution requires only of presidents:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.9
The president has serially usurped the power of Congress to write and amend the laws. When Congress has declined to enact his unpopular policy initiatives, such as the legalization of illegal immigrants and a cap-and-trade law that could fatally cripple the coal industry, he has presumed to legislate unilaterally and unconstitutionally, under the guise of executive orders and agency regulations.
The president has willfully defrauded the American people in the enactment and implementation of Obamacare. In addition, he has unilaterally and unlawfully amended and “waived” the statute’s terms—guided by his knowledge that timely, lawful application of the deeply unpopular law would be devastating to his party’s electoral prospects and would have made him a one-term president.
His administration has sicced the Internal Revenue Service and other government agencies on his political opponents—frustrating the capacity of conservative groups to have the powerful impact on the 2012 presidential election that they had on the 2010 midterms. Simultaneously, the administration has manipulated the law and the public fisc for the benefit of Obama’s political cronies. Contrary to the impression Obama conveys when his subordinates are caught using bureaucratic muscle to reward friends and harass foes—a frequent occurrence—the president is principally responsible for the misfeasance and malfeasance of his administration. He is not just an innocent bystander.
On Obama’s watch, the Justice Department has enforced the laws in a politicized and racially discriminatory manner. It has, furthermore, filed and threatened vexatious lawsuits against sovereign states to obstruct their lawful execution of public policy—particularly, the enforcement of laws against illegal immigration and election fraud. The president’s attorney general, Eric Holder, has exhorted state attorneys general to become more like him—to adopt the practice of ignoring the laws they are sworn to enforce when those laws depart from Obama’s progressive pieties.
Holder’s department orchestrated the astounding “Fast and Furious” operation, in which large quantities of firearms were knowingly sent to vicious drug gangs in Mexico. Top administration figures are, of course, rabidly anti-gun. Yet the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), in collusion with Justice Department lawyers, encouraged arms dealers to make illegal gun sales to “straw purchasers”—faux buyers whose true intention is to transfer the weapons in bulk to persons (usually illegal aliens and other criminals) who are not legally eligible to obtain them. At best, the ATF agents foolishly believed the straw purchasers would lead them to violent gangs against whom they could make a splashy case. More plausibly, the ideologues expected that the guns would end up tied to various atrocities, thus bolstering their political argument that America’s gun culture fuels international violence. Thousands of guns were allowed to walk, no meaningful prosecutions were developed, and, predictably, things went horribly wrong: some of the ATF guns have been tied to the murder of Brian Terry, a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Congress has tried to investigate Fast and Furious, just as it tries to investigate a web of administration scandals that would make Richard Nixon and John Mitchell blush. The president frivolously invoked executive privilege to stall the probe, after Holder was held in contempt of Congress for his misleading testimony and refusal to turn over Justice Department memoranda.
That, by the way, was before Mr. Holder provided misleading testimony to Congress about his role in the investigation of a Fox News journalist—right around the time the Justice Department secretly issued sweeping subpoenas for the phone records of Associated Press reporters, flouting the department’s traditional deference to free-press rights explicitly protected by the First Amendment.
More recently, the department has embarked on an invidious felony prosecution against Dinesh D’Souza for allegedly illegal contributions to a Senate campaign. D’Souza, an influential conservative, is the author of The Roots of Obama’s Rage and co-producer of the related movie, 2016: Obama’s America, both of which were popular with the public and despised at the White House. The D’Souza case is the one panned by Alan Dershowitz as “selective” and “outrageous.” The piddling sum allegedly involved, $15,000, is well beneath the Justice Department’s norm for criminal enforcement; it falls into the category that is routinely settled with a fine paid to the Federal Election Commission. Certainly it is not in the same stratosphere as the Obama campaign’s own multimillion-dollar campaign finance violations, which are felonies that the same Justice Department opted not to prosecute.
The president instigated a war, unauthorized by Congress and in the absence of any threat to the United States, against the Libyan regime of Muammar Qaddafi. At the time, the Obama administration was supporting Qaddafi’s government with public funds and portraying it as a key American counterterrorism ally. As is the president’s wont, the war against Qaddafi was fraudulently conducted: the public was told that the military assault was an impartial humanitarian enterprise to halt fighting between the Libyan government and insurgent forces; in fact, the American-led coalition one-sidedly bludgeoned the Qaddafi regime, while the administration secretly
