Impeachment: Obama is Guilty of What Exactly?

I remember the sort of helpless feeling many of us had in those days of conservative ascendancy. The early 1970s were a sort of tug of war between despair and retrenchment. Endless conflict in Vietnam, a rollback of Civil Rights, the disrespect for individual rights.  It wasn’t that we hadn’t felt the rumblings.

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We had all heard of the Watergate break-ins. Low level operatives of the Republican campaign had gone renegade and, unknown to managers, had burglarized the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Another burglary was less well known. Someone had broken into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

But very few of us thought any of that would lead to anyone who worked in the White House. That President Nixon would have been directing it – breaking and entering or covering up or anything else – was unthinkable to those of us who imagined ourselves on the sane side of the lunar orbit.

The degree of certainty that was required to imagine President Nixon as a guilty party was higher than the clouds. The sky eventually got closer as evidence became hard to avoid.

But only when tapes were discovered, when the President himself could be heard directly ordering crimes, did the dominoes fall. Some orders were carried out: break-ins, cover ups. Some of the President’s orders were received but were never actually acted upon. The Brookings Institution, for example, was never actually firebombed as President Nixon had directed.

As astonished lawmakers listened for themselves, conservatives eventually led the way. President Nixon became former President Nixon.

Here in Missouri, young dynamic Governor Kit Bond and his crusty old Lieutenant Governor Bill Phelps, both Republicans, had yet another falling out.

Kit Bond was part of the new Republican generation, open minded, pro-civil rights. He supported the Equal Rights Amendment for women. He rooted out old discriminatory laws. He led education reform involving parent participation.

Bill Phelps was older, crusty, and suspicious of anything newer than the Hoover Dam.

The split on Nixon was a surprise. Crusty old Bill Phelps demanded the President resign. Now! Young Kit Bond defended Nixon to the bitter end.

Two decades later, impeachment didn’t work so well for opponents of President Bill Clinton. In 1998, Republicans became the first opposition party in 176 years to lose congressional seats.

At least they had a modicum of legality to hang themselves on. President Clinton had lied in a legal deposition. He was told to give the identities, for the record, of all women with whom he had a romantic contact while in public office.

As I saw it, he should have suggested the interrogator perform an anatomical improbability. Instead of refusing to answer such a question, he lied on the record. That was then.

Today, the attitude of the Republican base toward President Obama is transparent. The polite fiction is that he is opposed for policy reasons. In fact the evidence supports a different conclusion. From the top down and from the base up, the record is one of motivations that are far less pristine.

For many of us, the election of our first black President was a healthy repudiation of the most shameful parts of our history. It seemed like evidence the page had turned to a new chapter.

But, from the beginning, that was not a universal view. There are many, too many for comfort, who regarded Obama as someone who simply did not belong, as a usurper, an outsider, an alien, as some sort of horrible accident.

The most visible part of that opposition comes from an incautious Republican membership. Racist signs at protests are not an aberration. They are a fact of conservative life. They are part of the Republican foundation – the base.

And the view from that base seems to mirror the view from the top. The idea that opposition to the President is a natural result of some flaw in his own policy or personality is counter to documented evidence.

On the very night of President Obama’s first inauguration, a group of top Republican lawmakers and strategists met. The country was in peril, teetering on the edge of a mammoth economic depression rivaling that of Herbert Hoover.

Hours into the new presidency, the conservative group decided to bring Obama down, no matter what it took. They determined they would obstruct, in every way possible, anything and everything the new President would ever, could ever, propose. It did not matter what, they would oppose it.

The newest mantra from the base is coming slowly to the surface of public discussion in Republican circles. This time, impeachment needs nothing more than a vague sense that something is wrong. There are no specifics. But the feeling is strong that all of the debunked scandals must still contain something of substance: Benghazi, the IRS, Obamacare, the economic bailout, something has to provide grounds for removal from office. The impostor must be turned out.

The case for impeachment, when it is attempted, will follow a familiar pattern:

President Obama is guilty.

The only decision left is: Guilty of what exactly ?

This article is a collaboration between MadMikesAmerica and FairandUNbalanced.

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