Hear me now and believe me later: If Republicans win and maintain control of the House of Representatives, they are going to impeach President Obama. They won’t do it right away. And they won’t succeed in removing Obama. (You need 67 Senate votes.) But if Obama wins a second term, the House will vote to impeach him before he leaves office.

Wait, you say. What will they impeach him over? You can always find something. Mini-scandals break out regularly in Washington. Last spring, the political press erupted in a frenzy over the news that the White House had floated a potential job to prospective Senate candidate Joe Sestak. On a scale of one to 100, with one representing presidential jaywalking and 100 representing Watergate, the Sestak job offer probably rated about a 1.5. Yet it was enough that GOP Representative Darrell Issa called the incident an impeachable offense.

It is safe to say that Issa’s threshold of what constitutes an impeachable offense is not terribly high. As it happens, should Republicans win control of the House, Issa would bring his hair-trigger finger to the chairmanship of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The Sestak pseudo-scandal disappeared because there was no process to drive the story forward. Had Issa been running the Oversight Committee, it would have been the subject of hearings and subpoenas.

And it is not as if Issa’s interest in the Sestak case springs from some idiosyncratic obsession with the generally common practice of using executive-branch jobs to lure candidates out of the Senate. His taste in Obama-related scandal is catholic. In addition to the Sestak allegations, Issa has called for the investigation or disclosure of matters weighty and not-so-weighty, including the so-called Climategate e-mail controversy, congressional recipients of friendly loans from Countrywide, the methodology behind the government’s statistics on jobs “created or saved,” the Treasury’s prior knowledge of the AIG bonuses, the leaking of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud suit against Goldman Sachs, the District of Columbia school vouchers program, all taxpayer-funded White House trips on behalf of Democratic candidates, the administration’s response to the BP oil spill and its drilling moratorium, National Labor Relations Board nominee Craig Becker’s possible conflict of interest, the “executive branch’s approach to food safety,” potential collusion between General Motors and the Treasury, and the firing of the inspector general of the Corporation for National and Community Service, plus many, many others.

This merely covers Obama’s first 20 months in office. No doubt more outrages would command Issa’s attention. Just as a rigorous IRS audit of a taxpayer is bound to turn up something, an investigation by the likes of Issa will eventually produce a scandal. Once you have grasped hold of the investigative machinery, the process drives itself. “We would never go looking for a scandal—they come to us,” Issa explained to National Review. “Typically, it is not the crime but the cover-up. The scandal comes when administration officials try to circumvent, not report, or distort what is happening.”

Obviously, Issa cannot impeach the president by himself. That would take a vote by the House of Representatives. But once a major figure like Issa puts impeachment on the table, it is impossible to imagine the rest of the party failing to go along. A December poll found that 35 percent of Republicans already favor impeaching Obama, with just 48 percent opposed and the balance undecided. That is a large base of support to impeach Obama for literally anything at all.

Once Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and the like collectively decide that this or that incident represents an intolerable abuse of power by the Obama administration, the conservative base will go from supporting impeachment to demanding it. At that point, the acquiescence of the House GOP would become inevitable. Since Obama took office, whatever willingness the party establishment had to resist the impulses of its base has been submerged beneath a wave of right-wing primary challenges.

Labels: American Idiots, assholes, impeachment, obstructionism, R.I.P. America, Republican brownshirts

Defying President Obama (as well as Democrats in Congress and pretty much anyone with an intelligent, informed position on the issue), House Republicans today defeated a bill that would have postponed the transition to digital TV until June.

Preparations for the switch to digital -- now scheduled to take place on February 17th -- have been beset with problems, including such poor publicity by the FCC that millions don't even realize the transition is set to happen.

To make matters worse, earlier this month the Commerce Department ran out of funding for coupons subsidizing digital converter boxes, prompting then-President-elect Obama to publicly back the delay.

The end result of this general incompetence? According to the AP, less than a month before the mandated switch:

The Nielsen Co. estimates more than 6.5 million U.S. households that rely on analog television sets to pick up over-the-air broadcast signals still are not prepared for the transition.

As consumer rights and media reform groups point out, the poor, rural and elderly will be disproportionately affected.

But what's a few million households without access to television -- including emergency transmissions -- when Republicans can stick it to Obama? As Reuters reports, House Republicans inexplicably decided to blame the President for the bill's failure.

Labels: assholes, obstructionism, petty bullshit, Republicans

Some of these arguments are obvious cheap shots. John Boehner, the House minority leader, has already made headlines with one such shot: looking at an $825 billion plan to rebuild infrastructure, sustain essential services and more, he derided a minor provision that would expand Medicaid family-planning services — and called it a plan to “spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives.”

But the obvious cheap shots don’t pose as much danger to the Obama administration’s efforts to get a plan through as arguments and assertions that are equally fraudulent but can seem superficially plausible to those who don’t know their way around economic concepts and numbers. So as a public service, let me try to debunk some of the major antistimulus arguments that have already surfaced. Any time you hear someone reciting one of these arguments, write him or her off as a dishonest flack.

There’s no denying that Obama tried; his initial stimulus package seemed designed as much to placate Republicans, as to please Democrats. His hope seemed to be that he could buy a little right wing love by putting way too much of the proposal’s spending into (relatively ineffective as stimulus) tax cuts, instead of public spending.

But congressional Republicans are having none of it. They may not have much actual power left, but that doesn’t seem to have put them in a mood to compromise. Either send up a pure George W. Bush-style tax cut package, they insist, or they’ll vote against the bill.

The major media, speaking right on cue, is spinning this as a test of Obama’s commitment to bipartisanship. I suppose they think that makes for a better story than the truth of Republican obstructionism. To these media “elites” the question now is whether Obama will be a good little post partisan president by giving GOP representatives everything they want, or an evil partisan politician (because he stands by his own principles as well as what might actually work).

So exactly what is it that the GOP wants?

This from The New York Times:

“Right now, given the concerns that we have over the size of this package and all of the spending in this package, we don’t think it’s going to work,” the House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And so if it’s the plan that I see today, put me down in the no column.”

While the plan can potentially pass the Democratic-dominated House without Republican support, it will continue to face opposition when it comes before the Senate, said Senator John McCain of Arizona, speaking on “Fox News Sunday.” At least two Republicans will need to approve the bill for a filibuster-proof majority vote of 60.

Senator McCain, who lost the presidential election to Mr. Obama in November, said that he planned to vote no unless the bill were changed.

So what sort of proposal will McCain and his defeated brethren support? From the same Times article:

“We need to make tax cuts permanent, and we need to make a commitment that there’ll be no new taxes,” Mr. McCain said. “We need to cut payroll taxes. We need to cut business taxes.”

Yeah, that’s the ticket. Let’s extend and even expand Bush’s tax giveaways to the rich. I mean, that’s worked out real well for us so far, hasn’t it?

There’s no mystery about what’s going on here, of course. The GOP smells blood. What Obama intended as an extended hand they took as evidence of a weak spine: they’re starting to think — or at least to hope — they can push him around, at least a little. For what it’s worth, I strongly suspect they’re wrong. Underestimating Barack Obama’s political skill has generally proven to be a mistake. But Obama’s the only person who can prove it, and the way he can prove it, of course, is by pushing a strong stimulus package, reflecting Democratic Party values, through Congress.

The message would be unmistakable: if Republicans want to participate in the formation of future legislation in good faith, his door is open. But pure obstructionism will not be tolerated.

Labels: economic death watch, obstructionism, Republicans, WATBs