Mark Levin is calling for her to be expelled from Congress. Good luck with that.
And Dan Riehl says that the president is on the verge of an impeachable offense. Good luck with that, too.
For what it’s worth, I thought that George Bush should have been impeached for signing McCain-Feingold. In doing so, he failed to keep his oath of office to defend the Constitution. It’s politically craven to sign a bill while saying that you think that it’s unconstitutional, and hope that the Supreme Court will fix it (they didn’t, at least not until recently). If a president believes that a bill is unconstitutional, it is his constitutional duty to veto it, and say why. It is the job of all three branches of government to obey and protect it, not just the judiciary. I’ve long given up any hope of Congress giving a damn about it, but I expected more of a Republican president. Silly me.
Personally, I think politicians should be regularly ejected from office for violating the Constitution. Unfortunately, that’s not the way things work today. Bush signed McCain-Feingold into law, stating publicly that it was unconstitutional. I’m sure his point was that Congress shouldn’t have passed it, but the constitutional requirements of his office and of his oath demanded that he not sign it into law. That was impeachable, too (though, of course, his own party wasn’t going to impeach him).
In my mind, Obama has acted extraconstitutionally in any number of ways, but so few give a crap about limited government that even a GOP Congress would likely let him slide unless there were an ethical lapse they could point to (corruption or another sex scandal).
Some go in Democrats and others Republican, but in the end they are all politicians.
Which is part of the problem. I think we should take Congress virtual (so everyone stays in their districts), repeal the 17th Amendment, and institute some sort of additional watchdog (akin to the old Roman censor, but a branch rather than an individual) with broad removal powers to delink our government from the Beltway. That’s far short of everything we need to do, but I bet it would help if they were less isolated and held more accountable.
There are a couple Bush doozies, but McCain-Feingold was top of the list for me, because it was not even a judgement call. Bush, as Rand notes, knew it was unconstitutional, yet abdicated his responsibility, flat and simple. Odd for a guy who called himself a “decider.” I would love to know what role Karl ROve played in that horrible decision, and what he thinks of that decision now.
Yes, McCain-Feingold was an instance where all three branches of government failed us. A perfect storm, if you will.
Fred Thompson said “the fix is in” for McCain in the 2008 primaries. Maybe McCain had some special relationship with Bush after the 2000 contentious primaries. By giving McCain this landmark legislation, Bush might have been horse-trading a “throw-away” bill, not expecting SCOTUS concurrence. Bush tended to “love his enemies” too much, including Ted Kennedy.
He was a “compassionate conservative” who naively thought that if he loved his enemies enough, they wouldn’t shank him. Ha ha ha.