Posted on 07/21/2014 6:54:02 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Barring any groundbreaking new developments, Congressional Republicans have no intention of trying to impeach President Barack Obama, despite calls for the commander-in-chief’s ouster by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.
“The Constitution is very clear as to what constitutes grounds for impeachment of the President of the United States,” House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., told ABC's George Stephanopoulos last week. “He has not committed the kind of criminal acts that call for that.”
Other establishment Republicans have similarly dismissed impeachment talk as little more than blowhards seeking headlines.
“No responsible Republican elected official has called for impeachment,” said Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard. “The Republican task is to elect a Republican Senate — and elect a Republican president in 2016 — not to create a phony issue that allows Democrats to make Republicans look extreme.”
And yet, every Republican candidate running for Wisconsin’s 6th Congressional District seat is apparently open to exploring impeachment.
State Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-Campbellsport, is well beyond the exploration stage.
"He should be impeached for so many things," the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports the veteran legislator saying at a recent forum.
The offenses, said Grothman, include spying by the NSA, the supposedly unfair auditing of conservative nonprofits by the IRS and scandals involving the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
State Rep. Duey Stroebel, R-Town of Cedarburg, said that what he believes is a cover-up of the cause of the 2012 attack on the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya, is the big reason the president may deserve an early exit from office.
State Sen. Joe Leibham, R-Sheboygan, the favorite and the candidate most identified with the party establishment, did not call for immediate charges to be drawn up against the president, but said he believed an independent prosecutor should be appointed to determine whether Obama had lied about what he knew about IRS investigations. Such evidence would be grounds for impeachment, he said.
Lest the party faithful doubt his disdain for Obama, Leibham later added, "His presidency is a scandal. He has destroyed America from the great capitalistic country it used to be.”
According to a recent national poll, only a third of Americans believe the calls for impeachment are justified. But that’s not the figure that matters to the three candidates heading into the Aug. 12 primary. More significant to them are the two-thirds of Republicans who believe it. Among the Republicans engaged enough to turn out for the primary, the portion who believe Obama is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors is likely higher.
Will the 6th District GOP candidates' impeachment positions hurt them in the general election campaign against Democrat Mark Harris?
Perhaps, but Harris remains a big underdog in the central-eastern Wisconsin district, which as a result of the 2011 redistricting favors the GOP. The district is rated R+5 by the Cook Political Report, meaning that it favors Republian presidential candidates by an average of 5 percentage points more than in the rest of the nation.
While the 6th was represented for three decades by Tom Petri, a well-known moderate Republican, its future representative will likely be wary of expressing too much friendliness towards Democrats for fear of provoking a primary challenge in the future.
I’m all for indicting the bass turd and putting his @$$ in prison but impeachment will work too, I guess.
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