by Sam Rolley
The surfeit of Barack Obama Administration scandals hitting headlines over the course of the past several days has increased the frequency of utterances of words like “fire” and “impeach” from politicians and American citizens all over the Nation.
While the calls for relief of duty are coming mostly from people on the right, those with more Democratically aligned political leanings are finding, largely for the first time since Obama’s election, that they are utterly lacking in their ability to write off the sentiment as right-wing zealotry run amok.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called publicly on Tuesday for the President to can Attorney General Eric Holder — a firing many conservatives have pined for since the Fast and Furious scandal — for violating the 1st Amendment in allowing the Department of Justice to spy on Associated Press reporters.
“Attorney General Eric Holder, in permitting the Justice Department to issue secret subpoenas to spy on Associated Press reporters, has trampled on the First Amendment and failed in his sworn duty to uphold the Constitution,” Priebus said in a statement to reporters.
“Because Attorney General Holder has so egregiously violated the public trust, the president should ask for his immediate resignation,” he went on.
Priebus said that if Obama fails to right the wrong by eliminating Holder, the President heading “the most transparent Administration in history” will send a clear — if damning — message to Americans.
“If President Obama does not, the message will be unmistakable: The president of the United States believes his administration is above the Constitution and does not respect the role of a free press,” the RNC chief concluded.
The case of AP spying is only one of the most recent in a running series of Administration scandals being revealed, or re-hashed, in the public eye. As the troubles pile up at the White House doorstep, Republican politicians have been granted an opportunity to make the case for Presidential impeachment without the reprisal of Democrats, suddenly neutered of their ability to defame them as right-wing nuts.
Last week, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) suggested that the President ought to suffer impeachment for his Administration’s handling and cover-up of the Benghazi, Libya, terror attacks last September.
“People may be starting to use the I-word before too long,” Inhofe said.
“Of all the great cover-ups in history — the Pentagon papers, Iran-Contra, Watergate, all the rest of them — this … is going to go down as the most egregious cover-up in American history,” Inhofe said.
While Inhofe is of the minority Party in his chamber, his colleagues in the Republican-controlled House are uttering “Obama” and “impeachment” in the same sentences with increasing frequency.
Representative Steve Stockman (R-Texas) began talking about filing articles of impeachment against the President way back in January, as the Administration was ramping up efforts to destroy the 2nd Amendment.
“The White House’s recent announcement they will use executive orders and executive actions to infringe on our constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms is an unconstitutional and unconscionable attack on the very founding principles of this republic,” Stockman said in a statement. “I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary, including but not limited to eliminating funding for implementation, defunding the White House, and even filing articles of impeachment.”
Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) expressed a similar sentiment around the same time. That lawmaker said that, at the time, Obama’s “staggering” abuse of law was already grounds for impeachment.
Representative Trey Radel (R-Fla.) followed up on Gohmert’s assertion stating that he too would support a GOP-led effort to impeach Obama.
On Monday, Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said that lawmakers would be remiss to take the possibility of impeaching the President off the table until it was absolutely certain that the Administration was absolved of wrongdoing regarding the Benghazi incident.
“It’s certainly a possibility,” Chaffetz said, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. “That’s not the goal but given the continued lies perpetrated by this administration, I don’t know where it’s going to go. … I’m not taking it off the table. I’m not out there touting that but I think this gets to the highest levels of our government and integrity and honesty are paramount.”
It’s not just lawmakers who want to initiate impeachment proceedings; a number of grassroots efforts to warm public opinion to the idea of stripping Obama of his power are also doubling down. Revive America PAC, a grass-roots super group that runs presidentdowngrade.com, sent an email to supporters Monday, proclaiming, “between ‘Benghazi-gate’, ‘Fast and Furious’, Obama’s ‘Gun-Grabbing’ Executive Actions, and now the latest IRS firestorm, it’s hard to say which disgusting Obama scandal will consume his Imperial Presidency first!”
Other conservatives have been less focused on taking action against people involved with the scandals who are currently in office and more on making sure that the same people are never allowed to hold positions of political power in the future. That is the tone that Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has taken in speaking about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her failures in Benghazi.
“She was in charge of the State Department. She was asked repeatedly for increased security for Benghazi. Some of the media have been reporting that because she didn’t read them she’s protected — she wasn’t responsible because she didn’t read them? I fault her absolutely for not reading the cables.”
Paul added: “Part of being in charge is triaging what comes to your desk and what doesn’t come to your desk. And to say that Libya wasn’t important enough for her to be reading the cables from the ambassador asking for more security, I think was inexcusable.”
Paul’s solution: “She came before my committee and said she never read any of the cables. I think it precludes Hillary Clinton from ever [again] holding office.”
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