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Don’t Impeach Obama, Censure Him

Forty years ago this coming week, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. Not long before his resignation, the House Judiciary Committee’ had approved articles of impeachment against him. The consensus is that Nixon had committed wrongs that amounted to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” specified in the Constitution for removal from office. There is general agreement among current White House critics that President Obama has not done so, with 2012 vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan being the latest GOP leader to express that view.

However, President Obama may soon change people’s minds if this fall he unilaterally suspends deportations of illegal aliens or extends work permits to them, using the excuse that Congress hasn’t passed the kind of immigration reform he would like. After all, no less a constitutional expert than Barack Obama told a Univision town hall in 2011: “With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case.”

President Bill Clinton remains the only modern president to have been impeached by the House, although the Senate acquitted him. At the time, I was a bitter Clinton critic. But in my role as a TV pundit, I didn’t support his removal as president. I’ve always felt that we need a middle path between routine political pummeling and ejection from office when we are dealing with a rogue executive. The House’s lawsuit against the White House for altering Obamacare dozens of times without consulting Congress is fine as far as it goes, but we need to make more use of the power of censure by Congress. In addition, a lawsuit could take years to wend its way through the courts and might not even be resolved until Obama leaves office.

Impeachment is akin to detonating a nuclear weapon on the field of politics. The American people shy away from impeachment. In a new CNN poll, fully 79 percent believe it should be reserved only for “serious crimes.” “Not only is its explicit purpose to legislatively overturn the sovereign judgment of the people at the ballot box, its impact on the work of the government, and on our domestic tranquility, is deeply corrosive,” notes Charles Cooper, who was head of the Office of Legal Counsel in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department. The OLC is tasked with acting as counsel for the president and attorney general on the constitutionality of laws and executive actions.

Cooper does believe President Obama has crossed a line that merits a serious impeachment inquiry. He notes that President Clinton’s lawyers, relying on a seminal House Judiciary Committee report on the Nixon impeachment, argued in 1998 that impeachment is to be “predicated only upon conduct seriously incompatible with . . . the proper performance of constitutional duties of the president office.” Among those are “conduct undermining the integrity of office, disregard of constitutional duties and oath of office, arrogation of power, [and] abuse of the governmental process.” In Cooper’s view, such actions have become just part of another day at the office for President Obama. In the new CNN poll, only 33 percent of Americans favor impeaching Obama, but a full 45 percent believe he has abused his powers as president...

Read entire article at National Review