Grover Norquist's 'Impeach Obama' Fantasy

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine

31 January 12

ne of the more piquant passages in the interview that Mark Warren and I did with former President Bill Clinton, which appears in this month's production of Esquire: The Magazine is this part right at the top where Clinton talks about a change of heart experienced by a former GOP congresscritter named Bob Inglis, who lost in a primary in 2010 because he said disrespectful things about Glenn Beck but who, in the giddy years of the late 1990's, wielded his pitchfork most enthusiastically in the cause of impeaching Clinton, an effort for which he recently apologized, according to the former president, who nonetheless told us:

I had a fascinating meeting with Bob Inglis the other day. Bob Inglis was an extremely conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina. He was a three-term-pledge guy in the nineties.... So he came to me and he said, "I just want you to know, when you got elected, I hated you. And I asked to be on the Judiciary Committee in 1993, because a bunch of us had already made up our minds that no matter what you did or didn't do, we were going to find some way to impeach you. We hated you. You had no right to be president."

This has been a consistent something-more-than-a-rumor ever since Bill Clinton took office - that the Republicans wanted him removed from the first day he took office, and that they were not waiting for a crime so much as they were waiting for the moment when they had the votes to do it. (That this is a monumental act of contempt for the people who elected him their president should not concern us here, because it apparently never concerned the Republicans.) At this point, of course, impeachment was still considered by the country at large to be a constitutional artifact, as it had been even at the beginning of the country. Thomas Jefferson was both wary of the political uses to which it could be put, and also prone to ridiculing the whole notion. In 1798, in a letter to James Madison, Jefferson called it "the most formidable weapon for the purpose of dominant faction that ever was contrived." Twenty-two years later, in another letter, this one to Thomas Ritchie, he famously dismissed it as a "scarecrow."

However, in committing themselves essentially to the impeachment of Bill Clinton with or without criminal cause, and simply because they had the votes for it, the Republicans seriously upped the ante, and they put flesh on Jefferson's scarecrow into the bargain. It was seriously argued in Republican circles that it is within Congress's power to impeach the president if they simply do not like the policies he attempts to enact. (In her impeachment book, Ann Coulter surmises that President George H.W. Bush theoretically could have been impeached for raising taxes, and thereby breaking a promise he'd made in accepting the Republican nomination in 1988.) I followed this whole thing pretty closely in 1997 and 1998 and I don't recall any of our prominent pundits, or many of the people covering the events, mentioning at the time that the Republicans were preparing to impeach Clinton for something just about from the moment his hand left the Bible, which is pretty much what Inglis copped to when he spoke to the former president more recently.

Which makes me a little less sanguine than most people when I hear that Grover Norquist is going on about the subject again:

Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.

Yes, and I have made "no effort" to convince Holy Mother Church to close St. Patrick's and open up a fried-dough stand in its place.

Over the past 10 years, and particularly over the past three, we have seen as a consistent strategy by conservative Republicans thinking, and then acting, on the unthinkable. Nobody ever used the filibuster the way they have. All the "gentlemen's agreements" that grease the wheels of the legislative process have become dead letters, no matter what dunces like Evan Bayh say. If you don't think they won't try this farce again, elect them majorities in both houses and see what happens.