Timothy Egan, a Beltway observer whose sound judgment is evidenced by his critiquing the circus from the sanity-preserving distance of the Pacific Northwest, condenses House Republicans' latest thumb-sucking insult to the Republic: "They will not legislate. But they will litigate."
Egan calls their suing of President Obama for doing his job the fulfillment of a "logical position." They are do-nothing clowns, so why not do nothing clownishly? Egan does not, however, say that Republicans' lawsuit is the apotheosis of a logical position--the fright-wigged, horn-honking, red-nosed pursuit of yet another comically calamitous "I" stunt.
Political junkdom is eager for House Republicans to get on with the show, but clown-shepherd John Boehner has been a Capitol party pooper in stopping short. Some may deplore the speaker for, say, sabotaging the economy or perpetuating a shadowy underclass, but we who revel in the squalid zaniness of The People's House scoff at such Dudley Do-Right antipathies. We just want the GOP's goddamn show to go on, since that's the surest way to shut it down.
One compensating comfort of Republicans' lawsuit is that it's nearly as popular as impeachment, which is to say, it's a joke. Fifty-seven percent of Americans oppose the lawsuit, says a CNN poll, while even more--about two thirds--oppose impeachment, which, as noted, the gavel-wielding party pooper insists is no part of Republicans' act. But that position is illogical. If the president of the United States is violating the law and abusing the constitution, indisputably it is the House's constitutional obligation to move for impeachment. Mere litigiousness is unAmerican.
Thus if I were a tea partier, or for that matter a Democratic activist, I would attend every August, town-hall GOP gathering I could, demanding to know what all this weak-sister lawsuit shit is about. Are Republicans no longer committed to the radiant, Palinesque rectitude of Constitutional Conservatism? If Obama is no felon he is at the very least an insufferable misdemeanant who deserves removal from office, just as John Madison prescribed when he penned Article I, Section 2 of our beloved founding document before famously riding through Salem in 1763 to warn of the coming of those nasty Bluecoats.