If Republicans Sue Obama, Democrats MUST Impeach Bush for Commiting Same Crime
August 11, 2014

 
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In 1867, two years after the assassination of President Lincoln, the Republican Party was in open revolt against a Republican president, threatening him with impeachment. In an attempt to reach out to the Southern states, President Lincoln replaced his 1st term vice president Hannibal Hamlin with Andrew Johnson… a Republican, but from the Southern state of Tennessee. Lincoln, who had just defeated the South, was barely a month into his second term (inaugurations were held in March back then) when he was assassinated and succeeded by the Southerner Johnson, who was quick to veto a series of bills he thought unfairly punished the Rebel states (okay, I admit, this is a bit of an over-simplification). Ironically, had Lincoln of lived, he probably would have done the same thing. But in the current climate, Johnson was branded a “traitor” that needed to be impeached. And they did. And for 222 years of this nations history, that was the one & only time Congress had ever attempted to impeach a president. (on this 40th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, bear in mind he only did so to avoid an impeachment he was sure to lose.) Then came Bill Clinton, for whom Republicans went on a six year binge of dirt-digging to try and… first defeat, and when that failed, impeach him… NOT for any crime he committed as president, but for lying to a Grand Jury during one of those dirt-digging investigations that they had no business holding in the first place. And now, just one term removed since the last Democratic president, the GOP is at it again, threatening to “sue” President Obama (while others openly talk of impeachment) for refusing to “uphold the law” (in this case, delaying the ObamaCare mandate, something they actually wanted.) One has to wonder if this is going to be the GOP’s S.O.P. from now on every time a Democrat wins a second term?

The problem is, the “crime” President Obama is supposedly guilty of, just about every prior president is also guilty of (and far worse). So if President Obama is guilty of a crime, so is his predecessor, George W Bush.

First Republicans thought they had something with “Fast & Furious”… the FBI Code Name for an operation to track the legal “straw-man” sale of guns in this country only to be transported across the border into Mexico. But that went nowhere fast (which made Republicans furious).

Then came “Benghazi”. But that’s really more about derailing Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations than it is about President Obama. And now that a NINTH investigation… this one actually chaired by Republicans… has cleared the White House of any wrong-doing any chance of using it to impeach Obama are as remote as Sarah Palin’s chances of becoming president.

Any dreamt-of attempt to link the imaginary Cincinnati IRS “scandal” to President Obama was a desperate long-shot at best. Oh they tried. Mightily. But even the most rabid partisan Republican Congressman knew they were grasping at straws at the off chance that the White House might have actually been micromanaging tiny individual IRS offices. That’s why you probably heard occasional claims of other IRS offices in other states supposedly guilty of the same thing, in hopes of bolstering the idea that what happened in Cincinnati was just part of a nation-wide effort by the White House to instruct IRS offices across the nation to target “Tea Party” groups for extra scrutiny. But no “nationwide effort” was ever uncovered, and so went that as a possible route towards impeachment.

More recently, it was the possibility that President Obama might unilaterally bestow “amnesty” upon the tens of thousands of Central American refugee children flooding across the Mexican border. But you can’t impeach someone for something they haven’t done yet. Threatening to impeach him might keep him from doing something, but Republicans don’t want to simply keep President Obama “in check”, they want him GONE… like yesterday.

That just leaves “ObamaCare”… which to their dismay, withstood a Supreme Court challenge as Constitutional, making it “the law of the land”. When the law passed in 2009, Republicans demanded that it not take effect until AFTER the next election (in hopes that a newly elected Republican president would repeal it before it ever went into effect. Democrats agreed and put it in the bill. Despite this accommodation, not a single Republican voted for it anyway.) But when President Obama won re-election handily, their next big concern was that rapidly approaching “March 2013” deadline for the “mandate” that everyone must have insurance. “Too fast!” “Not enough time!” “We’re totally unprepared because we were positive we’d win in November and the law would never take effect!” So now, Republicans and Republican-friendly corporations started begging President Obama for “more time!” to comply with the mandate. Seeing as how such a task might require more time for the largest corporations, President Obama agreed and instructed the IRS to delay any noncompliance penalties for large corporations.

And despite doing exactly what Republicans and big businesses wanted, Republicans took the President’s gesture as PROOF that the entire law is bad and will hurt big business. And by “not enforcing [this portion of] the law”, he is guilty of “a crime”… which is an impeachable offense. But since an impeachment would be a pointless waste of time without control of the Senate (and be hugely unpopular with voters tired of their partisan nonsense), they have instead opted for just “suing” him for “not enforcing the law”… a law mind you THEY DON’T WANT ENFORCED.

So, what’s the logic here (as if there actually is any)? Sue the president for delaying the mandate, and if you win, screw over all those (once Republican-friendly) corporations into having to comply with the mandate… now with even LESS time to comply since they thought Obama had given them some breathing room.
 

Have you REALLY thought this out guys? (Look who I’m asking. The same people that rushed us into Iraq without an exit strategy.)
 

The problem is, if President Obama is guilty of a “crime” by unilaterally not enforcing part of his own health care law, then former President Bush is also guilty of the exact same “crime” when he delayed implementation of “MediCare Part-D” in 2006. So, if what President Obama did was “a crime”, then President Bush is every bit as guilty and should be impeached.

Now, a lot of people don’t fully understand that term: “impeached”. It doesn’t mean “removal from office” and it doesn’t just apply to sitting presidents. An “impeachment” is a “criminal prosecution” that takes place in the House of Representatives. That’s all. You don’t have to even still be in office to be “impeached”. So “yes”, we can still hold impeachment hearings in the House for President Bush (and Vice President Cheney too if we were so inclined) retroactively. Hell, we could even go back and impeach Andrew Johnson again… not that it would do any good.

The media has wasted a lot of energy the past two weeks breathlessly reporting President Obama’s “low approval rating of just 41%”. (It’s a nonsense figure of course, dragged down by absurdly unrealistic Republican disapproval of Obama.) “That’s George W Bush territory” they proclaim! Something odd about any group that believes the the surest route to victory is to acknowledge just how bad the former head of your own Party was.

Let us all hope the GOP does actually attempt to sue Obama before the mid-term elections. Probably the shortest route to Democratic control of The House in November.
 

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August 11, 2014 · Admin Mugsy · No Comments - Add
Posted in: fake scandals, myth busting, Partisanship, Politics, rewriting history, Right-Wing Insanity, Unconstitutional

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