According to Representative Lou Barletta (shown, R-Pa.), there just may be enough votes in the House to impeach President Obama. Barletta contends that Obama’s flagrant disregard for the Constitution may have created an atmosphere in which he could lose the White House. Whether that actually happens is of course another story entirely.
“He’s just absolutely ignoring the Constitution, and ignoring the laws and ignoring the checks and balances,” Barletta opined June 16 on News Radio 910 WSBA with Gary Sutton.
The impeachment discussion came after Sutton and Barletta addressed illegal immigration. Sutton made the point that the president was not “faithfully executing the laws of this country.” In agreement, Barletta said, “Well we have a president that has taken this to a new level.”
Barletta went on to mention that lawmakers could respond to President Obama’s disregard for the Constitution through impeachment. “For those that say impeach him for breaking the laws or bypassing the laws — could that pass in the House? It probably could,” Barletta said.
Obama’s treatment of the issue of illegal immigration is just one of many misdeeds that have led some to engage in a discussion of impeachment.
Earlier this month, President Obama angered lawmakers, including members of his own party, and more importantly, the American people, when he failed to inform Congress of the Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and Taliban prisoner swap. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) loudly expressed her outrage and accused the president of “totally breaking the law.”
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) warned that Republicans could call for President Obama’s impeachment if he released any more prisoners from Guantanamo Bay without congressional approval. “There will be people on our side calling for his impeachment if he did that,” said Graham.
This is not the first time lawmakers have threatened President Obama with impeachment, and the threats have come from not just the GOP.
In 2011, former Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) said that he believed Obama’s actions in Libya constituted “an impeachable offense” because “the President committed the U.S. to military intervention without consulting Congress, in clear subversion of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives only Congress the power to declare war.”
Appearing at this year’s Western Conservative Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, even actor Steven Seagal reiterated the various reasons to consider impeachment charges against this president:
I think that when we have a leadership that thinks the Constitution of the United States of America is a joke, when we have a president who has almost 1,000 executive orders now, when we have a Department of Justice that thinks that any kind of a judicial system that they make up as they are going along can get by with whatever they decide that they want to do — like Ted Nugent said the Fast and the Furious, what’s happening with the Fast and the Furious? What’s happened with the truth about any of the greatest scandals of American history that have happened right before our eyes? If the truth about Benghazi were to come out now, I don’t think that this man would make it through his term. I think he would be impeached.
Regardless of whether Obama’s actions in the White House have justified impeachment proceedings, some Republicans have made it fairly clear that they are not prepared to take such actions.
Barletta’s communications director, Tim Murtaugh, later clarified Barletta’s comments made to Sutton by indicating that he was not “advocating or proposing” that the House impeach Obama, but that he was merely addressing one proposed way in which Congress could stop Obama’s agenda.
Democratic National Committee spokesman Ian Sams later responded to Barletta’s remarks by stating that while Republicans are convinced that a vote as “outrageous and ill-founded” as impeachment could pass, “let’s not forget all the commonsense initiatives they refuse to even bring up for a vote.”
Sams continued by stating that Republicans should be focusing on immigration reform, as well as other liberal talking points such as raising the minimum wage and making equal pay for women a legal requirement.
“Republicans in the House are clearly committed to playing politics and relying on outrageous rhetoric instead of doing the job they were elected to do — standing up for the interests of the American people,” Sams told the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader in an e-mail.
But polls show that it might be in “the interests of the American people” to bring impeachment charges against Obama. President Obama’s approval rating has dropped to 41 percent, according to a new survey by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News. The findings show that a majority of Americans disapprove of his handling of foreign policy issues, and that he has lost some support from the Hispanic community.
The survey also shows that Americans actually think his administration is less competent than the Bush White House post-Hurricane Katrina.
Chuck Todd of NBC News states that the survey spells very bad news for President Obama. “This poll is a disaster for the president,” Todd said. “You look at the presidency here: Lowest job rating, tied for the lowest; lowest on foreign policy. His administration is seen as less competent than the Bush administration, post-Katrina.” “On the issue of do you believe he can still lead? A majority believe no. Essentially the public is saying your presidency is over,” Todd added.
On the specific issue of the Bergdahl swap, a WND/Wenzel poll shows that 54 percent of Americans view Obama’s actions as providing aid to terrorists, a violation of federal law, and therefore an impeachable offense.
“The country’s disapproval of the Obama prisoner exchange likely stems from the fact that they feel the national security of the U.S. should always trump the health and safety of one soldier,” said Fritz Wenzel of Wenzel Strategies.
He said the message is not good for the Obama administration, particularly as 27 percent of Democrats polled responded that they viewed impeachment as a solution. Wenzel noted,
The die has largely been cast on this as a serious foreign policy blunder, reinforced by the thought that these five Taliban leaders may well come back to haunt the U.S. much the way Obama’s walk away from Iraq is also now blooming into a disaster of epic proportions.
For a man who came into office promising to unite the world and heal old wounds, the meltdown in the Middle East must be disturbing to even Obama’s staunchest supporters. This survey shows the American public has lost all confidence in his leadership abroad, and that they are growing less and less likely to trust his judgment — if not his version of the facts.
In 2013, long before the Bergdahl swap scandal which has only served to fuel calls for impeachment and not quell them, a book written by Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott and published by WND, entitled Impeachable Offenses, outlined all of the reasons for which Obama should be impeached, citing various things such as misdemeanors, bribery, and other offenses committed against the U.S. Constitution. Some of the offenses listed in the book include ObamaCare, sidestepping Congress through executive orders, and Obama’s failure to uphold immigration laws.
According to the U.K. Daily Mail, the book contains “a systematic connect-the-dots exercise that the president’s defenders will find troublesome.”
Photo of Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.): AP Images
