Unimpeachable Character

Jill over at Brilliant at Breakfast argues this morning that the White House better get on stomping this Joe Sestak job offer thing into the ground, because the Party of No is already shifting into Lewinsky Mode.  Salon:

The zeal that Rep. Darrell Issa has brought to his pursuit of the allegations that the White House dangled some kind of job in front of Joe Sestak last year while they were trying to muscle him out of the Pennsylvania Senate primary is impressive, if also a little amusing. Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, has been thundering about an alleged bribe, using scary words like "impeachable," "crime" and "ethics complaint." (Actually, considering how rarely the House Ethics Committee can be roused to do anything about lawmakers, that last one isn't so scary.)

But as Alex Pareene has already noted, this isn't exactly the first time someone in politics cut a deal for a job. When Sen. Judd Gregg was going to leave Congress to join the Obama administration -- which, in the end, he didn't do, because he realized he disagreed with everything President Obama stands for -- he wasn't going to take the appointment to become commerce secretary unless his replacement in New Hampshire's Senate seat would caucus with the GOP.

Right, so Issa's not about to throw fellow Republican Judd Gregg under the bus just to go after Obama, right?

If you've been paying any attention over the last, oh, 16 years, you know the answer already.

After we hung up, though, I found a quote from a Gregg statement, making clear he wanted a Republican appointed (and another quote from Gregg's appearance with Obama, where he thanked New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch, a Democrat, for "his courtesy and courage in being willing to make this possible through the agreement that we have").

Which, to Bardella's credit, and Issa's, meant he changed his tune a little bit.

"If the White House had come to Judd Gregg and said, 'We will make you the secretary of commerce, in exchange for which we will guarantee the appointment of a Republican,' that would be just as wrong," Bardella said. (Which is, of course, exactly what happened.) "That would be worthy of the same scrutiny and would still be a violation of how [Obama] said he would govern. Once you vacate your seat, you announce your intention to take another job, you lose the right to dictate what should happen to that seat. No one person owns a seat ... Offices in the United States Congress should not ever be used as bargaining chips."

So to recap: Issa's staff says Gregg's deal is just as bad as the one Sestak alleged. We'll pause here to allow for the angry phone calls and e-mails back and forth between people who work for Gregg and Issa. (And while we wait, we also have a call in to Gregg's office for comment, which wasn't immediately returned.)

As Jill points out, this is where it will begin.

Let's not forget that Republicans regard ANY Democrat who is elected President by the will of the people as illegitimate. This is a party that has embraced the teabaggers and the birthers and is looking for ANY EXCUSE WHATSOEVER to remove this president from office. They did it before with Bill Clinton, when they tried to impeach him for lying about an affair -- something their peeps do all the time. They will trump up bullshit, and their lackeys in the media will huff and puff and clutch their pearls in outrage. Because where the media is concerned, the IOKIYAR rule always applies. (And yes, I'm talking to you, Chuck Todd.)

But remember one thing: Whatever this president's shortcomings, he's got a lot on his plate right now: a still-faltering economy, a persistent terrorist threat from the Middle East, a rise in right-wing violence and threats of violence here at home, tension between the Koreas, Europe on the brink of chaos, and an oil company run amok in the Gulf of Mexico. The last time the Republicans decided to impeach a president over nonsense, the effort failed because Americans regarded him as a lovable scamp. Barack Obama's cool aloofness will not serve him as well.

I happen to agree with her.  Understand that should the GOP take control of the House in November, Obama will face impeachment hearings.  This is an absolute, like gravity, birds crapping on your freshly washed car, and Uwe Boll movies based on video game franchises sucking horribly.  If you think Obama's doing a lousy job, that's one thing.  Do you think the Republicans deserve to be back in control?  That's another thing entirely.

[UPDATE] WaPo's Jon Bernstein agrees.

The incentives all run to impeachment, as far as I can tell. The leaders of such an effort would find it easy to cash in (literally, I mean) with books and appearances on the conservative lecture circuit. It's hard to believe that Rush, Beck and the rest of the gang wouldn't be tripping over each other to wear the crown of the Host Who Brought Down the socialist gangster president. And we've seen the ability, or I should say the lack thereof, of rank-and-file GOP pols to stand up to the talk show yakkers. Besides, it's not as if a new Republican majority would have a full agenda of legislative items to pass, and what they did have would face an Obama veto (and most likely death in the Senate at any rate). Against all that is the collective preference of the Republican Party not to have a reputation as a pack of loons, but that doesn't seem to be much of a constraint in practice. Of course, also against impeachment is the lack of a serious offense by the president, but I don't see that as a major impediment -- if offering a job to a potential Senate candidate is an impeachable offense (and see Jonathan Chait if you think it really is), then they'll have no trouble at all coming up with something.

It's not like voters punished the GOP short term in 2000 for impeaching Clinton in 98-99.   They ended up controlling Congress and the White House, remember?