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An open letter to the Wall Street Journal
responding to the editorial "The Impeachment Delusion,"
published 10 July 2014 at
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-impeachment-delusion-1404947221
by Terence James Mason
[email protected]

Special to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

Mr. Taranto,

First, I apologize if this appears self-promotional, but I've covered this ground before and feel it incumbent to provide the relevant links.

I am responding to the subject editorial content, and in particular to the statement therein, "...the Constitution says a President can be impeached for "Treason, Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Bill Clinton lied under oath and Richard Nixon obstructed justice. While Mr. Obama's abuses of executive power are serious, they don't rise to that level."

I must ask, what are "(serious) abuses of executive power" if they are neither crimes nor misdemeanors?

Two specific examples (there are numerous others in the essay series "The Impeachable Offenses of Barack Hussein Obama" by myself, at L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise, www.ncc-1776.org, as well as Senator Ted Cruz's list of impeachable offenses and other authors who have addressed the subject prior to Mrs. Palin):

Collusion (conspiracy) to defraud the rightful senior creditors of General Motors and Chrysler of their fair return during the bankruptcy proceedings of those two companies, complete with intimidation of said creditors. A commercial agent guilty of such actions could rightly be convicted of racketeering and other crimes. As I have said for four years, for that alone he should be impeached. While one might argue (unbelievably) that that Mr. Obama was not personally involved in this action, any commercial executive who permitted this to happen under his supposed supervision could be charged with criminal negligence and fired, fined, and punished—just as Mr. Obama has, equally illegally, required or forced on several corporate executives during his term in office.

Fraud on a massive commercial scale (at least $2 trillion over ten years) in the lies used to sell "Obamacare." And there is no deflection possible, as Mr. Obama himself in this case said on numerous occasions, "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan."

That said, I do agree that it is politically impossible to impeach Mr. Obama. As President Ford stated, "What, then, is an impeachable offense? The only honest answer is that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers to be at a given moment in history; conviction results from whatever offense or offenses two-thirds of the other body [the Senate] considers to be sufficiently serious to require removal of the accused from office." The fact remains that Mr. Boehner neither commands the two-thirds majority in the House necessary to make a trial for impeachment successful, nor would Mr. Reid allow a single Democrat Senator to vote for removal from office if impeachment did succeed in passing the House. The one lesson of Mr. Gingrich's term as Speaker is that it is futile to move forward on impeachment until you know you have the votes to secure both impeachment and removal from office—and that will not happen until Mr. Obama's actions become so egregious that Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Reid, and a majority of both of their caucuses are willing to bring suit themselves. Which, since they personally with substantial fractions of their caucuses approve of the President's actions to date, is so unlikely as to not merit consideration. In other words, we're stuck with the situation and have to make the best we can until Mr. Obama retires from office on 20 January 2016.

This conundrum, incidentally, is why in my book No Loopholes: Getting Back to Basics, and available on Kindle and Nook at links therein), in consideration of new Congressional Amendments to supplement a more-tightly enforced ("No Loopholes") Bill of Rights, (and a year in advance of Mr. Levin's book on the subject), I proposed a Constitutional Amendment to permit the States to bring charges of Impeachment, and to vote to remove from office (by a 2/3 majority of States, with 60% legislative majorities in each vote) both a lawless President and those members of his party who refuse to hold such a President to account for illegal actions.

Respectfully,

Terence James Mason

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