Over the past week or so we have been reviewing the many ways and perspectives on how the Obama Presidency has been a total failure:
- We reviewed the many, many lies and deceptions of this administration and this President, from cutting the annual budget deficit in half to promising that you could keep your doctors under Obama Care to many others.
- We reviewed the many high ranking Obama administration officials that have illegally and immorally conducted government business, and likely government shenanigans, using personal, unofficial computers and email accounts, undermining the spirit and letter of the Freedom of Information Act, other laws, and Obama's own promise to operate the most transparent administration ever
- We reviewed the many instances where this administration has either allowed government functions and departments to continue to overspend but under deliver or allowed them to get even worse than when he took office.
- We also reviewed some past posts that we had done previously that laid out numerous reasons and actions that should have already led to the impeachment of this Presidency, based on violations of existing law, judicial rulings, and the Constitution.
Despite all of these analyses across different aspect of being President, we are still nowhere close to being done. Between today and yesterday we will have reviewed previous posts from January, 2014 where we laid out over 60 reasons why this Presidency is a failure. Yesterday we went through the first 40, today we finish up with the next 21.
While these are not necessarily grounds for impeachment, they certainly are grounds for failure, with many of these failures using Obama’s own words to show how far short his administration has fallen of being even somewhat effective. Afterwards, we will update that original list with many other examples of failure that have occurred since that early 2014 analysis.
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THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2014
Part 3: The Next 21 Reasons That Are Not Grounds For Impeachment and Removal From Office
Twenty More Reasons (Reasons 41 Through 61) For Which Obama Cannot Be Impeached and Removed From Office.
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 law under which they should have been operating.
We have been trying to make that distinction over the past 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 have been covering those failures and disasters in the past few days along with today.
Those first two lists of forty failures can be found at:
Today, after we finally finish going 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 in the following days. 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 finish going 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.
That is the reason that the following failures, and the many, many failures we have discussed over the previous two days, are not grounds for impeachment and removal from office; they may be despicable, they may be embarrassing, they may be wasteful, they may be outright deceptions, but they are not grounds for removal under the Constitution.
[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]
President Obama cannot be impeached and removed from office because...
41) He failed to live up to his promise of reducing the obscene number of earmarks in the annual Federal government expense stream, with the value of earmarks at almost the exact same level of waste as when he took office five years ago.
Relevant Obama quote: “We need earmark reform, and when I'm President, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.”
42) He signed the renewal of the Patriot Act with little discussion or change, a piece of legislation that has caused a significant drop off in freedom and privacy in this country.
Relevant Obama quote: "We will revisit the Patriot Act and overturn unconstitutional executive decisions issued during the past eight years."
43) His administration has, at times, incurred MONTHLY deficit spending levels that were higher than almost every other ANNUAL spending deficits from every other President including Bush.
Relevant Obama quote: “Today I’m pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office. This will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges we’ve long neglected. But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay — and that means taking responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control.”
44) He failed to foresee the Arab spring, resulting in an unpreparedness that has considerably weakened the American influence in the entire Middle East region.
45) His Obama Care legislation has resulted in many new taxes being directly or indirectly imposed on every American.
Relevant Obama quote: “If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.”
46) The national debt has increased over $7 TRILLION during his first five years in office, imposing an individual debt burden of over $50,000 on every man, woman and child in the country.
Relevant Obama quote: Relevant Obama quote: "America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit."
47) Of his many lies, one the biggest lie was to blame Congress for the impacts of the sequester, an idea that he proposed, and an idea he later denied ever proposing despite the public record of his proposal.
Relevant Obama quote: “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.”
Relevant Obama quote (Bob Woodward): “What the president said is not correct [that he did not propose the sequester]. He is mistaken. And its refuted by the people who work for him.”
48) In cahoots with Congress, he secretly signed legislation that modified the STOCK Act, a secret signing that allowed Congressional members and their staffs to again conduct stock trading based on their insider secret knowledge of legislation that was pending, proposed or possible in the future.
49) He allowed his administration to spend millions of dollars to buy fake Twitter and Facebook hits and followers while at the same time signing legislation that reduced the pension benefits of our veterans.
50) Despite wining the Nobel Peace prize, according to Gallup's international polling, 23% of world citizens in a recent opinion poll still view the United States as the biggest threat to world peace, almost three times more than the next nearest threat (Pakistan), and more than four times higher than either Russia or China.
51) Despite promising to have the most transparent administration ever, Transparency International recently proclaimed that corruption in the United States was growing faster than anywhere else in the world except Cuba, Dominca, and Burkina Faso.
52) Analysis of IRS records showed that 36 Obama White House employees owed over $800,000 in back taxes and over 300,000 Federal employees owed about $3.5 billion in back taxes but all of whom were allowed to continue to draw their full Federal salaries and benefits; which should not be a surprise since he nominated any number of tax evaders and/delinquent tax payers to important government positions including Kathleen Sibelius (head of Health and Human Services), Timothy Geithner (Secretary of the Treasury), Solis (head of the Labor department), Tom Daschle (who ended up not working for this administration) and others.
53) He broke his promise not to sign non-emergency legislation before it had been posted on the Internet for at least five days.
54) He broke his promise to televise the Congressional hearings regarding Obama Care debates and proceedings on C-SPAN so the entire country would understand what was going into the legislation.
55) He lied when he stated that the Supreme Court had never overturned any law that had been passed by Congress, he lied when he said the auto bailouts he supported prevented Detroit from going bankrupt (it did go bankrupt), he lied when he said that Al Qaeda was almost defeated since we now know that Al Qaeda controls more physical territory in the world than it ever has before including battlegrounds in Iraq that cost Americans hundreds of lives and billions of dollars, he lied when he denied saying that he had ever declared a “red line” regarding Syria’s use of chemical weapons. (relevant Obama quote: “A red line for us is when we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around.”), he lied when he falsely claimed that health insurance companies were the cause of millions of insurance policies being cancelled when in truth it was the Obama Care legislation requirements that legally forced the cancellations, and he lied when he falsely claimed that an insurance company had refused to pay for his mother’s cancer treatment. Note: the Obama Care lies are too numerous to mention here, please go to the following link for a detailed discussion of those additional lies the phrase, "unfolding disaster"int he search box above.
56) Three years after the Dodd-Frank financial industry reform legislation has been passed, less than half of the needed regulations required by the legislation have been written by the executive branch.
57) He vindictively shut down White House tours and DC war memorials during the sequester and government shutdown, claiming lack of government funds, but somehow found government funds to keep his favorite government run golf course open the whole time.
58) He insulted the families who had loved ones die or be wounded by the Fort Hood terrorist attacker, Nidal Hasan, by claiming they were merely victims of “workplace violence” and not terrorism; this cold designation resulted in those families and victims not getting just compensation for their losses and suffering while at the same time paying over $200,000 in government salary and benefits to the shooter and terrorist Hasan as he awaited trial.
59) He refused to fire the IRS employees who lost $67 million from an Obama Care slush fund, he refused to fire ATF employees who lost over 400 million cigarettes in their position, he failed to fire anyone connected with the $600 million Obama Care website that did not work, he failed to fire anyone who was connected with the botched rollout of Obama Care including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, etc.
60) He refused or did not care to rein in absolutely stupid and unnecessary government spending including research money used to build a robotic squirrel, development of a video game to simulate prom week, conducting pottery classes in Morocco, determining when dogs became man’s best friend, constructing a million dollar bus stop in Arlington, Virginia, keeping a dog handler (earning over $100,000 a year) on the White House payroll to handle the Obama family’s dog’s needs, keeping three full time professional calligraphers on staff, and other such extraneous, unnecessary and wasteful spending and nonsense.
61) He criticized waterboarding and secret rendition of suspected terrorists but then went forth and simply just killed suspected terrorists and collateral damage civilians directly by drone attacks.
Relevant Obama quote: "We will not ship away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far off countries, or detain without trial or charge prisoners who can and should be brought to justice for their crimes, or maintain a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law."
Let’s stop at 61 reasons. We could go on but you get the idea: this administration botched the whole Syrian civil war/poison gas debacle, tried to bribe a Pennsylvania politician (Joe Sestak) not to run against an incumbent Pennsylvania Senator (Arlen Specter), failed to take care of 200,000 veterans who are homeless on our streets, needlessly and recklessly stationed 2,500 U.S. Marines in Australia for no reason, failed to rein in a growing poverty level, etc., etc., etc.
But let’s stop at these 61 reasons that cannot be used to impeach and remove the President from office. They are 61 reasons to get you ticked off for mismanagement of the economy, mismanagement of taxpayer funds, ineffective economic policies and results, cronyism, insider trading, etc. But no matter how ticked off you get, not impeachable offenses
But that does not mean there are not impeachable offenses in play. And that will be our topic over at least the next two days, serious breeches of the Constitution and existing laws that do rise to the standard of serious “crimes and misdemeanors.”
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Eight posts and we have still not identified all of the reasons why this administration is an abject failure. More evidence of the failure in the following days.
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:
