Impeaching Obama would be crazy. But the Republicans will probably try

 Washington DC

So it’s come to this: the only thing that can save President Obama from his own complacent and lofty self-regard, not to mention his serial failures, are his enemies, and that is what it appears they are about to do. Even as his poll numbers sink to new lows that not even George W. Bush or Richard Nixon sunk to, even as the economy continues to falter, even as the so-called US-Mexico border devolves into chaos, even as al-Qa’eda’s successor establishes its own state in the ruins of Syria and Iraq, and even as the Democrats appear on the verge of losing the Senate as well as the House of Representatives, Obama’s foes seem eager to resuscitate his presidency by launching a demented movement to impeach him.

There is, for example, Sarah Palin, the indefatigable former Governor of Alaska and heartthrob of ageing white males, writing on Tuesday on Breitbart.com to demand that Obama be ousted: ‘It’s time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment. The many impeachable offences of Barack Obama can no longer be ignored. If after all this he’s not impeachable, then no one is.’

There is the South Dakota Republican party meeting this past weekend to call for the impeachment of Obama for ‘violating his oath of office in numerous ways’. And there is the Washington Post columnist George F. Will, who recently wrote a column calling upon House speaker John Boehner to sue Obama for ‘offences against the separation of powers’. Boehner is widely expected to do so soon, if for no reason other than to placate the Tea Party types. His spokesman Michael Steel says, ‘The House has passed legislation to address this, but it has gone nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate, so we are examining other options.’

The trouble with trying to impeach Obama, other than the fact that it’s not only bound to fail and that the American Constitution contains no provision for jettisoning a president based on failure, is that it will allow him to gloss over his own hapless record.