Let’s face it, the country is not in great shape these days. We have a government that cannot even develop a website despite spending well over $600 million to do so. We have a political class that is more concerned with their own welfare and perpetual reelection than the general welfare of Americans. We have a skyrocketing national debt that will burden Americans for generations to come. We have anemic economic growth. We have a President who claims he has no knowledge of the multitude of scandals erupting around him. Major safety nets such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are lunging towards insolvency. We have lost the war on drugs. The list seems endless some days.
In these desperate times, a person typically wants to find a culprit and make them accountable. The most obvious culprit is the leader of the country, President Obama. Unfortunately, there is a difference between incompetence vs. high crimes and misdemeanors that would allow the country to impeach and remove a sitting President from office.
Having stupid policies and programs, and mismanaging them to boot, is not grounds for removal from office. Maybe it should be, it would save the country a lot of suffering, but that is not allowed under our current legal system. The voting booth is supposed to be for that purpose. In order to remove someone from office, they must violate any of the tenets of the Constitution and Bill of Rights or existing laws under which they should have been operating.
We will try to make the distinction over the next few days. While many of us feel that the Obama administration has been the worse one in the history of our country, sinking even below the disaster that was the Carter administration, there are a load of failures that cannot be used for impeachment and removal from office. We will cover those failures and disasters in the next few days.
After we go through the myriad of reasons that can not be used for impeachment and removal from office, we will go through a still substantial list of reasons while President Obama should be removed from office for high crimes and misdemeanors. Consider that list to be the list of charges that would be read at a potential lawbreaker’s arraignment.
That list of charges would then go to a grand jury, i.e. the House of Representatives, where they would decide which charges, i.e. indictments, if any, would be brought forth. Those indictments would then be debated and voted on for conviction or non-conviction in the Senate.
That is the process: arraignment based on likely criminal charges, grand jury-like action in the House to lock down substantial and provable violations of the law, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, leading to a formal indictment, and then onto the Senate for trial, based on the House indictments.
But first, lets go through the many disasters and failures that cannot be put on the list of charges that are reviewed for indictments that are then part of a Senate impeachment proceeding. Keep in mind that you cannot remove a President from office:
- For having ineffective and/or stupid policies.
- For being ineffective in executing his duties of office.
- For being arrogant, narcissistic, and pompous.
- For waging class warfare and dividing the nation into voting blocs.
- For lying about his past or his promises.
[Note: associated with many of the failures listed we have attached notable quotes from the President and other reputable sources to show how far and how quickly his promises and assertions degenerated into lies, deceptions, and failures]
In no particular order, President Obama cannot be impeached and removed from office because…
1) He promised to quickly shut down the oppressive detention center at Guantanamo Bay shortly after being elected but failed to do. This has resulted in the American taxpayer paying out almost half a billion dollars a year to keep the detention facility up and running.
Relevant Obama quote: "We will close the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, the location of so many of the worst constitutional abuses in recent years."
2) He promised to cut the annual deficit in half but instead ran up record setting TRILLION dollar deficits for four years in a row.
Relevant Obama quote: “What my budget does is…by the middle of this decade our annual spending will match our annual revenues. We will not be adding more to the national debt.”
Relevant Obama quote: “When George Bush came into office, our debt—national debt—was around $5 trillion. It’s now over $10 trillion. We’ve almost doubled it… But actually I’m cutting more than I’m spending, so it will be a net spending cut.”
3) He promised that if his economic stimulus program was not implemented, unemployment could go as high as 8%. The program was implemented and unemployment skyrocketed well beyond 8% and stayed there for a record number of consecutive months.
4) He promised that economic programs such as Cash For Clunkers would stimulate the economy but subsequent analysis has shown that all those programs did was waste billions of dollars for no economic benefit. The latest analysis by the Brookings Institute shows conclusively that Cash For Clunkers involved about 380,000 vehicles, none of which were incremental, economic stimulating sales, they were sales that would have happened anyway but without taxpayer support.
Relevant Obama quote: “Now, more American consumers will have the chance to purchase newer, more fuel efficient cars and the American economy will continue to get a much-needed boost."
5) He has abused and disrespected our armed forces’ veterans by allowing veterans’ benefits requests turnaround time to skyrocket to over a year, coldly and unnecessarily shutting down veteran memorials during the sequester, and legislation that reduces veterans’ benefits.
Relevant Obama quote: “When you take off the uniform, we will serve you as well as you've served us - because no one who fights for this country should have to fight for a job, or a roof over their head, or the care that they need when they come home.”
6) He has presided over economic polices that has seen about a 50% increase in the number of Americans that are receiving government food assistance, a total of about 47 million Americans.
7) He has presided over economic polices that have left well over 20 million Americans either unemployed or under employed.
Relevant Obama quote (Associated Press, July, 2013): "Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream."
8) He has presided over economic policies that have resulted in large numbers of college graduates unable to land a job in their preferred profession, assuming they can find a job at all.
9) He presided over economic polices that have kept minority unemployment levels substantially higher than the overall unemployment rates in America.
10) He has presided over an $833 billion economic stimulus program that was so inefficient that it conservatively cost over $300,000 per job created or saved, an unsustainable and failed economic policy.
11) He has failed to rein in wasteful spending in the Medicare program which loses about $70-90 billion a year through waste, inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud.
Relevant Obama quote: “It's time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.”
12) He has failed to rein in wasteful spending in the Medicaid program which loses about $30-40 billion a year through waste, inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud.
13) He has failed to rein wasteful spending in the Social Security program which loses over $100 billion a year through waste, inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud.
14) He has failed to eliminate the tens of billions of dollars lost every year via unemployment insurance, disability programs, food assistance programs, Obama phones, and government housing programs to waste, inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud.
15) He has failed to operate an efficient IRS process, an organization which readily admits that it fails to collect over $380 billion a year from tax evaders.
16) His health care reform legislation has proven to be nothing more than a Rube Goldberg-like insurance scheme that is causing millions of Americans to lose their current health care insurance coverage, to lose access to their preferred doctors, to spend much money more for both their insurance premiums and deductibles, is adding substantially to the national debt, is causing a doctor shortage as more and more doctors retire early to avoid the trauma and nonsense of the legislation, and never addressed the real root causes of escalating health care costs, dooming his approach to failure.
Relevant Obama quote: “And that means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”
17) He has taken extravagant and expensive vacations around the world, spending hundreds of millions of dollars, while Americans sit by and watch as their chances for a good job and good future go unrealized.
18) He has played more golf and attended more campaign fund raisers than any other President, time that might have been better spent fixing the problems facing the country and its citizens.
19) He has done nothing to improve the scholastic performance of American kids who badly trail many other countries along all measurements of educational excellence and who spend far less per student than the Federal government and the Obama administration do.
20) Despite promising to operate the most transparent Presidential administration ever, he has decided that White House visitor logs will no longer be made public, breaking a long tradition of allowing Americans to know who is visiting the White House.
Relevant Obama quote: "For a long time now, there’s been too much secrecy in this city. Information will not be withheld just because I say so. It will be withheld because a separate authority believes it is well-grounded in the Constitution."
These are the first 20 reasons that regardless of how bad the performance was, no matter how badly these actions did not resolve a national issue, no matter how much taxpayer wealth was wasted, none of these reasons probably is sufficient to become an indictable offense and impeachable offense.
And despite how bad and embarrassing and expensive these failures are, there are still more failures to come tomorrow.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:
www.loathemygovernment.com
It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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