the simplest answer. To successfully impeach a president you need the votes in the U.S. Senate. With Harry Reid and the Democrats controlling the Senate, it can’t succeed.”12
Truer words were never spoken.
Time to put the cards on the table: There is no doubt in my mind that President Obama ought to be impeached and removed from office. I believe the Constitution’s framework—in particular, the Framers’ ingenious separation and balancing of competing powers within the central government, and between that government and the sovereign states—is indispensable to liberty, which is so central to the American character. The Constitution, moreover, is the social compact. It established the solemn terms that induced the states to ratify our fundamental law and form a more perfect union. It answers the aspiration of our Declaration of Independence: to institute a government the powers of which derive solely from the consent of the governed and the limited purpose of which is to secure our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—not to rule us. It is history’s greatest proven generator of prosperity, security and human flourishing.
The rise of the administrative state over the last century has profoundly challenged the Constitution’s framework, but President Obama has quite intentionally undertaken to dismantle that framework. That is what the president’s commitment to “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” is all about. President Obama seeks to agglomerate power in the federal executive branch, enabling him, without meaningful opposition, to remake our nation. No longer would it be based on liberty, with the citizen guaranteed protection from oppressive government. The Obama dream is the nightmare about which Alexis de Tocqueville warned: a comparatively soft tyranny, in which the individual serves an “immense and tutelary” state and its centrally planned, punctiliously regulated society, enjoying only as much liberty as the government deigns to grant him.13
While I vigorously oppose it, I do not begrudge the president his vision of the just society: government redistributing wealth, hyperregulating property so it is no longer private in any real sense, enforcing a perverse notion of equality in which unequal treatment is applied to achieve a humanly unachievable equality of outcomes, and dramatically downsizing America’s role on the world stage. What I object to is the president’s pursuing these ends by violating his oath to preserve the Constitution, shredding the separation of powers, using the vast bureaucracy to repress his political opponents, and misleading the public about both his objectives and his failures. I believe the president should be impeached because I am not confident the nation can withstand nearly three more years of his governance. Oh, we would still be here, of course, but it would be a very different country, with the president having set precedents for worse to come.
Many Obama critics look hopefully to the 2014 midterm elections, calculating that a Republican landslide will put the GOP in control of both houses of Congress, which would purportedly derail Obama’s onslaught and end the constitutional crisis. This is wishful thinking. Even if we assume for argument’s sake that Republicans will have a big electoral victory in the fall, there would be little prospect of stopping the president.
Right now, Republicans control the House of Representatives, in which the Constitution vests primacy on taxing and spending. With forty-five seats in the Senate, where minorities enjoy parliamentary advantages they do not have in the House, Republicans also have the votes, right now, to stop new Obama initiatives and to support the House were the latter to stop financing the president’s excesses. And yet, cowed by the Obama-friendly media, they have offered nothing but token resistance. Republicans are paralyzed at the very thought of using the power of the purse. The one time that House conservatives did so—in attempting to defund or delay the implementation of Obamacare in 2013—they were savaged by the Beltway GOP leadership.
I do not see any of this changing after the midterm elections. Even if Republicans win, the same Republican leaders will still be running the show. Moreover, Republicans are not going to come close to winning the lopsided majorities necessary to override Obama vetoes. As a practical matter, that means the president will not need to veto many bills. Democrats, unlike Republicans, would stick together in the Senate and coordinate closely with House progressives to kill any GOP-sponsored legislation aimed at rolling back Obama’s agenda. If past is prologue, Republicans will rarely even attempt such legislation. They will shrug and tell us that resistance is futile.
Perhaps more significantly, American presidents have enormous power over the conduct of foreign affairs and over the direction of the sprawling executive bureaucracy. If Congress becomes more of a dead end for Obama than it is now, he will simply redouble his determination to rule by international agreements and executive orders—to be imposed on Americans by the administrative agencies that run the country day to day, and by the federal courts whose benches the president has been filling with hundreds of like-minded progressives since 2009.
The Constitution provides two congressional avenues for reining in presidential lawlessness: the power of the purse and the authority to impeach the president. They are extraordinarily powerful remedies—and they are the only remedies available. Some lawmakers appear to think there is a third: Unwilling or unable to persuade their colleagues to use the constitutional powers available to the legislature, they hope to have the courts do the work for them, and to look as if they are mounting real resistance by filing their ballyhooed lawsuits against the administration. It is a feeble strategy.14
It is not the purpose of the federal courts to resolve national controversies. They were created to remedy individual injuries but given no power to enforce their judgments. That, indeed, is why Alexander Hamilton anticipated that the judiciary would be the “least dangerous” branch: Controlling neither sword nor purse, it would be “least in a capacity to annoy or injure” the “political rights of the Constitution.”15 In fact, the law of “standing,” which addresses what grievances litigants may bring before courts, teaches that the more a controversy affects the body politic rather than the individual citizen, the less appropriate it is for judicial resolution. It is for just such controversies that we have political rights.
American jurisprudence counsels the judiciary to stay out of “political questions,” disputes between the two political branches over the extent of their competing authorities. Most judges will not give such suits the time of day. Even if some unexpectedly do, litigation takes years to resolve. When it finally ends, we are reminded that courts are powerless to give effect to their own orders. Indeed, the Obama administration is already scoffing at judicial rulings that, for example, stripped the federal government’s power (under the 1965 Voting Rights Act) to “preclear” state election laws, such as new voter ID provisions; and that invalidated the president’s “recess” appointments—when Congress was not in recess—to the National Labor Relations Board.16 When a federal judge in New Orleans ruled that the administration’s announced moratorium on deepwater drilling following the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was illegal, the administration simply stopped issuing drilling permits—in effect, imposing an unannounced moratorium that continued the lawlessness.17
In the unlikely event that judges presume to rule against the president, they must depend on his executive branch subordinates to enforce their directives. Good luck with that.
If Congress is unwilling to use its command over the treasury to coerce the president into heeding the limits of his power, impeachment is the only other alternative to the current Congress’s obviously preferred course of abdication. If you won’t defund malfeasance, you have to remove it—or accept it. There is no other course. Plus, as we shall see, the Framers saw impeachment as the appropriate response to presidential corruption, lawlessness, and infidelity to the Constitution. It is the designed tonic for faithless execution.
In the final analysis, though, my belief that President Obama should be impeached counts for nothing (beyond the duty of full disclosure to the reader). In fact, it counts for very little that members of Congress may believe that they can
