Missouri Republican Representative Todd Akin had some fun zingers recently in Columbia.
Why hasn’t Congress impeached President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder? Rep. Todd Akin says it’s simply a lack of votes. But he says that may change eventually.
Because impeachment has never, ever backfired on Republicans…
“I think some of the thought was, he’s coming up at this point for election and the best way to impeach him is the ballot box,” Akin said. “So I think that’s the thought, because you’re never going to get something through the Senate. That doesn’t mean that at a certain point you just say enough, I don’t care enough about the Senate, duty calls us to just get up and just impeach this guy. And maybe he’s not quite gotten to the point where you’ve got the Republicans — basically all the Republican bloc is not quite mad enough for that.”
Well, that’s saying something.
I suspect this is just some shameless pandering to the unwashed masses. Still, Akin has been the Congressional representative for Missouri’s 2nd District since 2001, and he’s been something of a nut for far longer than that. He has a masters of divinity supplementing his “management engineering” degree, and I can’t even think of an appropriately snarky comment regarding divinity degrees. I feel as though someone who has written extensive fan fiction mashing up Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Grey’s Anatomy ought to receive a comparable degree.
Anyway, Akin really doesn’t like the President. He doesn’t much care for liberals, either:
Rep. Todd Akin, a Republican, was discussing NBC’s recent removal of the words “under God” from a clip of the Pledge of Allegiance during coverage of the U.S. Open.
“Well, I think NBC has a long record of being very liberal, and at the heart of liberalism really is a hatred for God and a belief that government should replace God,” Akin told radio host Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. “This is a systematic effort to try to separate our faith and God, which is a source in our belief in individual liberties, from our country. And when you do that you tear the heart out of our country.”
Akin, who is running in the GOP primary for Missouri’s senate seat, released a statement Tuesday apologizing for his comments.
Akin, a Christian, expressed that he and his family would never “question the sincerity of anyone’s personal relationship with God. My statement during my radio interview was directed at the political movement, liberalism, not at any specific individual.”
Getting back to the point of this post, he seems to be saying that impeachment could be an option in the future. The Constitution allows impeachment as a remedy for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” a term that still has no clear definition after roughly 225 years of constitutional jurisprudence. We know it can include getting/lying about blowjobs in the White House. It can also cover the high crime of, uh, being Andrew Johnson. What has President Obama to merit this most extreme of acts?
Still, Akin said he had plenty of relevant concerns: Obama, he said, “ignores the Constitution, he ignores the laws, he wants to impose all of the czars, he completely ignores the train wreck of the economy, which he’s causing with trillion-dollar-plus deficits every year you go along.”
Translation: if Obama does it, it’s impeachable. At least Akin advocates waiting until after the election, if applicable. If Obama gets re-elected, he will either lose all his hair by 2016, or it will all turn some sort of super-gray.
Seriously, though, Rep. Akin is talking about impeachment, the Congressional attempt to remove the President of the United States from office outside of the usual electoral process. It requires sober reflection and dispassionate consideration. What say you, Rep. Akin?
“He is a complete menace to our civilization,” he said. “The question is what’s the best way to get rid of him, I think probably at the ballot box next election, we need to get that done.”
Our civilization??? Yeah, this is going to be a long election season.
Photo credit: ‘Jackass’ by Izmaelt (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
