The book makes many good points about the Obama administration's flouting of both the Constitution and the statutes on the books for political purposes, making a mockery of the oath the President (and each of the members of his administration) took upon taking office, but falls short on the big point that it claims to be focusing on. The author opens the book with an anecdote that illustrates that impeachment of a President is not just a legal act but a political one: there has to be a political consensus around the nation to remove the President before it can succeed, given that removal requires a 2/3 vote in the Senate. He then claims he will build the case for such a political groundswell. But he really doesn't do that very well. He just lists all the things that have happened since January 2009 that constitute possible grounds for impeachment. That isn't a political focus, it's a legal one. I am inclined to agree that many of them -- the blatant refusals to enforce laws pertaining to nuclear waste disposal, immigration, and health insurance; immense spying on Americans, including journalists, without warrants or probable cause; widespread use of military force in theaters as to which there has been no Congressional authorization; the likely use of the IRS to frustrate political opposition; -- are un-Constitutional and even impeachment-worthy. especially in light of the Nixonian parallels of several of them. But the author never really transforms his list of Constitutional offenses into a political strategy.
How, for instance, is he going to convince an increasingly Hispanic electorate about the virtue of enforcing laws that frustrate personal and familial aspirations of Hispanics? That is the political issue, regardless of the legal analysis that a President lacks the prerogative to abandon the enforcement of those laws. Or, for another instance, which non-Republican Senators could somehow be induced to vote to remove Obama in the final two years of his term and by what means of persuasion? Not addressed at all.
Also, a good chunk of the events he complains about occurred and were well-known prior to the 2012 election. He doesn't try to explain how large numbers of people who voted to re-elect this President in 2012 knowing about them can be induced to become outraged about them two or more years later.
The cold-blooded political fact, even after reading this book, is that when a party wins the White House and has enough Senators, only smoking gun evidence of dereliction of duty so extreme that it is indefensible by anyone up for re-election is going to put a President at risk of removal. The way our judicial system works, although a private party can complain about individualized harm suffered from being the target of un-Constitutional governmental action, there is no legal path to force the executive branch to live up to its Constitutional function to carry out laws faithfully. So the elite political operatives within each party have figured out they can get away with violating the Constitution as long as they keep a large enough bloc of voters happy and manage to elude high-level judicial review (which gets a lot easier if you have a Senate majority to control the judicial appointment process!).
The best I could say about the book's aspirations in regard to the political process is that it may serve to enrage enough voters to turn out and vote for the opposition in 2014, in which case, even though they are not likely to remove anyone from office, they will at least serve as a check of some measure on the disregard of the Constitution we have seen the past several years and in particular should be able to limit the appointment of judges inclined to indulge it.
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O. G. M. Morgan
Why Obama Should be Impeached - and How to Go about It.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 7, 2014
