海角大神

While the news is dominated by headlines from Gaza and Ukraine, along with some rather alarming reports about an ebola virus outbreak in Africa that we haven鈥檛 touched on here, the American political world seems to be talking a lot about the impeachment of President Obama. It started, of course, with the comments by Sarah Palin that set off something of a political firestorm notwithstanding the efforts of top ranking Republicans to squelch that talk.聽Despite these efforts, polling indicates that a majority of Republicans support the idea of impeachment聽even while a majority of Americans oppose the effort. On Sunday, the new House majority whip, Republican Congressman Steve Scalise, dismissed talk of impeachment as a Democratic fantasy, and today Speaker John Boehner said basically the same thing in comments to reporters Tuesday. At the same time, Democrats have taken no small amount of glee in the whole spectacle, including launching what has been a rather successful fundraising effort based upon it. This, inevitably, has led conservatives to assert that the entire impeachment meme is little more than an invention the the Democratic Party and a biased media.

Consider, for example, this from Byron York:

Noah Rothman picked up the theme this morning at聽"Hot Air":

There鈥檚 no doubt that the Democrats are taking some no small amount of glee in all of this impeachment talk because of the difficulty that it puts the Republicans in, and in the past weekend alone they managed to raise more than $2 million dollars thanks to fundraising e-mails sent out that specifically mention it.聽They are also likely hoping that this kind of talk, which is clearly overwhelmingly unpopular with Democratic voters and also with the American public as a whole, will motivate voters to come to the polls in November and offset an expected Republican midterm advantage. Additionally, as I have said when I鈥檝e written about this topic in the past, I think it鈥檚 fairly clear that the Republican leadership, and even a good portion of the people who are part of what would be called 鈥渕ovement conservatism鈥� want nothing to do with the entire impeachment meme. Many of these people, most especially people like House Speaker Boehner and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell who were around the last time that the Republican Party tried to impeach a president, realize that the entire idea would be a waste of time since there鈥檚 no way they could actually obtain a conviction in the Senate, where 67 votes would be necessary, and that the act of impeachment itself would likely be deeply politically damaging to the Republican Party heading into the 2016 elections. For that reason, I largely take them at their word when they say that they are rejecting the idea of impeachment. However, I would submit that this is not the end of the story.

As Greg Sargent notes today, and as I鈥檝e discussed before, it is rather apparent that the same Republicans dismissing the idea of impeachment as nothing but a Democratic fundraising ploy are also well aware that impeachment thep resident isn鈥檛 just a fringe idea in the Republican Party. Three recent polls, from Rasmussen, YouGov, and CNN/ORC International,聽have shown that a majority of Republicans favor impeaching the president. This support seems to be stronger when you narrow down to people who consider themselves strongly conservative and/or supporters of the tea party movement. While none of these polls have measured how strongly the respondents feel about the issue, or whether they consider it a priority or something that a Republican controlled Congress ought to do before the president leaves office, it is plainly obvious that the base of the Republican Party is far more supportive of the idea of impeachment than the dismissive attitudes of conservative leaders and members of Congress would have you believe. I would submit this is why they have adopted the strategy of trying to blame Democrats and the media for focusing on this issue, because attacking the idea more directly risks potentially antagonizing a base that they need support form in the November elections.

As I have noted before, the leadership鈥檚 response to talk of impeachment is in many ways similar to the way that it reacted one year ago to the talk that conservatives led principally by Ted Cruz would force a government shutdown over the issue of defunding Obamacare. At this time last year, Republicans in the leadership, as well as prominent budget hawks like Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, were pointing out just how foolish and unworkable the idea was and the leadership in the House was seemingly making it clear that they would not permit themselves to be manipulated into allowing a shutdown. By August, House majority leader Eric Cantor was openly deriding the idea. That position seemed to hold well into September and yet, when the time came for the decision to be made, the leadership found that they had been backed into a corner and had no choice but to adhere to a course of action that they knew could not possibly work.

As Sahil Kumar notes, it鈥檚 not hard to imagine a similar course of events unfolding some time in the next year or so:

Perhaps Feehery will be proven correct. It certainly does seem as though Boehner and the GOP leadership have learned a lesson from the shutdown disaster of 2013, for example. At the same time, though, these people have proven themselves to be particularly inept at winning battles against the fringe tea party base of the GOP over the past three years or so. Speculating that they wouldn鈥檛 be able to hold back an populist push for impeachment from that same crowd, especially when it becomes apparent that the ridiculous lawsuit they are about to file will accomplish absolutely nothing, or when the president takes yet action exercising executive branch authority to do something that Congress refuses to do doesn鈥檛 strike me as being all that far off the mark.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.