Republicans Keep Talking Impeachment

Ross Douthat:

Over the last month, the Obama political apparatus — a close aide to the president, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the “independent” voices at MSNBC — has been talking nonstop about an alleged Republican plan to impeach the president. John Boehner’s symbolic lawsuit against the White House has been dubbed “impeachment lite,” Sarah Palin’s pleas for attention have been creatively reinterpreted as G.O.P. marching orders, and an entire apocalyptic fund-raising campaign has been built around the specter of a House impeachment vote.

Anyone paying attention knows that no such impeachment plan is currently afoot. So taken on its own, the impeachment chatter would simply be an unseemly, un-presidential attempt to raise money and get out the 2014 vote.

But it isn’t happening in a vacuum, because even as his team plays the impeachment card with gusto, the president is contemplating — indeed, all but promising — an extraordinary abuse of office: the granting of temporary legal status, by executive fiat, to up to half the country’s population of illegal immigrants.

We're up to the point where we're not talking about impeaching the President for something he did, but for something he might do, and could, legally.

Rep. Steve King:

Host Chris Wallace asked King what he would do if Obama decides to delay deportations, and Rep. King answered, “None of us want to do the thing that’s left for us as an alternative, but if the president has decided that he is simply not going to enforce any immigration law, or at least not against anybody except the felons, which essentially he has done already this is a broader group of people. I think Congress has to sit down and have a serious look at the rest of this Constitution, and that includes that i-word that we don’t want to say, and I only say now on this program, because I want to encourage the president, please don’t put America into a constitutional crisis, please don’t do that. There’s too much at stake in this country to be deciding that you can take over the Constitution and write it at will.”

Wallace asked if he was saying that impeachment was on the table. King answered, “I think that we have to sit down and take a look at that. Where we would we draw the line otherwise? If that’s not enough to bring that about, then I don’t know what would be.”

So now we have Republicans openly threatening the President with impeachment if he acts.  But it's all a Democratic party ploy, right?   Steve King is blatant:  if you act on immigration, we will impeach.

But yes, it's all Democrats talking it up.