Democrats were counting on impeachment, and they’re disappointed that it hasn’t happened in time for the 2014 midterm elections. Ever since the GOP grew a spine and decided to file a lawsuit against the President for executive overreach (I.e. thirty unilateral changes to Obamacare, unilateral changes to immigration law, overturning DOMA by executive order, etc), the White House has erected the straw man of impeachment to distract from the merits of the House case against the Administration. The Democratic National Committee is sending out fundraising letters to rally the President’s base ahead of the Congressional midterms, claiming that Congressional Republicans are preparing to impeach the President for, in the words of White House press secretary Josh Earnest, “[just] doing his job.”
First, the Constitution makes pretty clear that the President isn’t just “doing his job,” but trying to usurp the powers of Congress instead of enforcing U.S. law, which is his actual job. Thus, the House lawsuit is anything but frivolous and without merit. Secondly, the House’s action is just that: a lawsuit, not impeachment. House Republicans finally out-maneuvered the Administration by using a court remedy rather than impeachment, which would play into the political strategy of the Left. Instead of filing articles of impeachment, which would go nowhere in the Democratically dominated (for now) Senate, the House as a body filed a Federal lawsuit, which has a much higher probability of success than impeachment proceedings. Such an end-run around impeachment undermines the Democratic line-of-defense that the Congress wants to impeach the President for just “doing his job.”
This doesn’t mean the Dems won’t still try and resurrect the specter of impeachment in time to try and rally their base for the midterms, but it is now less likely to work. The White House knows this as well, which is why their political arm is threatening that the President will take unilateral action on immigration and that the GOP will impeach him for it. They’re reaching for a two-fer here: resurrect the impeachment claim while trying to push Hispanic voters further from the GOP. It won’t work, though, because the American people in general, and Hispanic voters in particular, are seeing through this administration’s all-politics all-the-time agenda. America has serious problems, and Americans are looking for serious people to solve them. Given this Administration’s games and gimmicks, Americans are more certain as to where these serious people aren’t, now it’s up to the Republicans to show what serious leaders look like (and this latest round of votes before August recess didn’t help).
