There are crises from the Middle East to Ukraine, while Washington struggles to cope with a sudden influx of unaccompanied children and single mothers crossing into the US from Mexico and Central America. Yet, what seems to be animating Congressional Republicans just now? Their plan to file a lawsuit against US President Barack Obama.
Republicans allege that the president has overstepped his powers and is, in some way, undermining the very foundations of American government. What exactly they expect the courts to do about this is less clear. The entire exercise is particularly fascinating because it is widely believed (among DC pundits, at least) that the lawsuit is really an attempt by House Speaker John Boehner to stifle calls in his caucus for a much more radical move — impeachment.
Two recent polls showed that around one-third of Americans back the idea of impeaching Obama. The split was predictably partisan with very few Democrats favouring the idea while a significant number of Republicans (58 per cent in one survey, 68 per cent in the other) did. The polling organisations (Rasmussen and YouGov) went out of their way to note that both the overall numbers and the partisan split were similar to how Democrats felt about George W. Bush in the final two years of his presidency.
The difference is that when anger at Bush reached a fever pitch among ordinary Democrats there were never more than a few members of Congress willing to utter the word “impeachment” and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed such talk out of hand.
Boehner is a relatively weak Speaker who has never successfully demanded that kind of political discipline from House Republicans. He has also been in Congress long enough to remember that the last Republican drive to impeach a Democratic president (Bill Clinton in the late 1990s) came to be seen as a politically-motivated witch hunt and turned out badly for the party. Fifteen years later Clinton is arguably the country’s most popular political figure and his impeachment — only the second in US history — has become a footnote to his presidency.
Boehner appears to hope that the prospect of a lawsuit will calm the nerves of angry Republicans and take impeachment — long considered the nuclear weapon of American politics — off the table. Whether this will work is open to debate. On the hard right talk of impeachment has been brewing for quite a while, driven by the increasingly isolated and partisan media worlds in which too many Americans now reside.
Almost a year ago one Republican Congressman, Blake Farenthold of Texas, told constituents “if we were to impeach the President tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it.” He went on to say that the problem was the Senate, where the two-thirds majority necessary to remove a President from office did not exist. Another Texas congressman, Joe Barton, made a similar assertion last week.
Obama-focused vitriol
It should not be surprising when politicians like Farenthold and Barton — conservatives representing districts no Democrat would have a hope of wining — confront angry constituents who badger them about the president’s supposed crimes. Among Republican politicians talk (on TV, at least) of the president’s ‘lawlessness’ is common. When a congressman goes on TV to complain that the president is ‘out of control’ it should hardly be surprising that voters then ask what he or she plans to do about it. Extreme voices exist on both sides of the political spectrum but are far, far stronger on the right. Among Republicans talk radio, a slew of right-wing websites and, most importantly, Fox News find large audiences to whom they feed an almost unbroken diet of Obama-focused vitriol. There are similarly shrill voices on the left but, unlike their right-wing counterparts, they do not command a mass audience and find virtually no support among the party’s professional political class.
The question is whether Boehner will succeed in placating his right, both in Congress and among the party faithful, with a lawsuit. Cynics have already pointed out that a lawsuit this complex and wide-ranging is unlikely to be settled in the courts in the time Obama has remaining in office. Boehner’s supporters claim they have a plan to fast-track everything and get a ruling in just a few months.
This seems unlikely, and the danger, as more than a few observers have already pointed out, is that when the Republican base figures this out it will demand something faster and more dramatic. Something like impeachment.
Let’s be very clear: Obama has done nothing remotely impeachable. Even the staunchly conservative chair of the House Judiciary Committee recently acknowledged this. Having released the party’s innermost demons in the service of short-term political gain, the question in the coming months will be whether the men running the Republican Party can still control them.
Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches political science at the University of Vermont.
