Why a Government Shutdown Would Imperil the Power of Congress

From CounterPunch, former Reagan economist Paul Craig Roberts ponders a possible scenario if House Republicans follow through with their as-of-yet unstated threat to shut down the government unless they get whatever they want:

With these precedents, it is a simple matter for President Obama to declare that, with the U.S. at war in a world of growing instability, he has the inherent power to ignore the debt limit and to continue financing the government with the creation of new money by the Federal Reserve.

Congress could try to protect its loss of the power of the purse by impeaching Obama. But how credible would it be to impeach a wartime president who is using the same “inherent power” of his office that Congress permitted the previous president to use?

The powers that Bush asserted not only violated statutory law, but also set aside constitutionally guaranteed rights that are the essence of American liberty. Yet, Congress made no attempt to restrain him with impeachment. How then does Congress impeach a president who is merely using his power to keep a government at war operating?

More here.

The excerpt above ends with an enormous question for which I have a very short response: GOP rules only apply to Democrats. That is, the Republicans, in this scenario, would have absolutely no problem impeaching Obama. They would see no irony, no contradiction, no hypocrisy. And the Democrats, in both houses, would probably join them. The press, too.

It doesn't matter that the GOP Congresses of the last decade ceded vast amounts of power to the President because we're at war. From their perspective, they only granted those powers to Republican Presidents. As laughable as that sounds, just go back to the Clinton impeachment.

Remember that, even though all the hysteria was about a blowjob, the technical reasons for the attempt to remove a democratically elected President from office had to do with the perjury in which he engaged over a matter that was completely unrelated to the seemingly endless Whitewater investigation that spawned old Bill's testimony, an investigation in which the Clintons were absolved eventually of all wrongdoing. Yes, the President perjured himself, but it was over a marital infidelity with no consequences in terms of the ostensible allegations; that is, the whole thing was a set-up for the express purpose of toppling him. My take, based on hearing the endless stream of opinions offered by Constitutional law scholars on television at the time, was that, while bad, the nature of Clinton's trespass just didn't rise to the level of the "high crimes and misdemeanors" for which the Constitution calls when Congress contemplates impeachment.

But the way the Republicans were spinning it, a President's perjury, on any topic, at any time, for any reason, under any circumstance, does indeed constitute "high crimes and misdemeanors." Vague philosophical arguments strongly asserting that the entire judicial system of the United States was threatened by Clinton's blowjob lie were offered to explain why the President just had to be thrown out of office. The GOP huffed and puffed and beat their chests for days on end.

Fortunately, the US public, generally being far more reasonable than the class of narcissists who lead us, didn't buy it. That apparently gave Clinton resolve to fight the thing, which ended up with his beating the charges in the Senate. Sometimes sanity does happen in American politics.

Flash forward only a few years to the revelation that Bush stole the White House by having his brother Jeb throw tens of thousands of African Americans off the voter roles in Florida back in 2000. Or a few years after that when it became apparent to everybody that there were no WMD in Iraq, and that the White House had probably lied about them in the first place. Or only a few months after that when reports surfaced of torture at Abu Ghraib, with strong circumstantial evidence that these war crimes were ordered directly from the Oval Office.

What did the impeachment-happy Republicans in Congress do when confronted with evidence of serious crimes committed by the White House? Nothing. Nothing at all. Lie about a blowjob; get impeached. Commit war crimes and steal the White House; get away with it.

So granting Bush all these war-time Presidential powers would mean nothing if Obama did something with them they didn't like. They'd impeach him in a heartbeat. Like I said, GOP rules only apply to Democrats--Republicans are never held to task for such violations; no one even mentions it when a Republican does something for which the GOP has lambasted the Democrats.

Remember, Republicans just don't understand the concepts of irony or hypocrisy.

Besides, it'll never come to that. Democrats just aren't as ballsy as Republicans, and Obama is no different. He'd never defy Congress in the way Roberts suggests. Nonetheless, I'd still give fifty-fifty odds that the House finds something stupid to impeach him with, maybe something like the White House's refusal to defend DOMA--oh wait, there's already rabble-rousing in that vein coming from one of the past's great idiots.

Sigh.

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