I’ve been sorta kinda following the Sestak pseudo-scandal trying to figure out why it was scandalous. But of course there’s no reason except that the Right wants it to be a scandal because they want to impeach President Obama.
The charge is that the White House tried to bribe Joe Sestak into dropping out of the Senate primary race against Arlen Specter. The reality appears to be that former President Bill Clinton was sent to ask Sestak to consider not entering the race, not to drop out of it. And perhaps Sestak would have been appointed to an unpaid advisory position. No money was offered, in other words.
It sounds vague and preliminary, and it also sounds like fairly standard political horse trading to me. Exactly where is the scandal? I’m not seeing it.
Yet this non-scandal has been sucking all the air out of political news for the past couple of days — proof that the Republican Noise Machine is still in operation.
Steve Benen speaks to what will no doubt happen if Republicans re-take the House and/or Senate in November. The GOP will not rest until they can bring articles of impeachment against Obama, and they won’t be terribly picky about what charges they concoct to do so.
I continue to believe that if Obama sits in the White House for six years with a GOP majority in the House of Representatives that the odds are very good — better than 50 percent — that he’ll be impeached. Not convicted, of course, but impeached, forcing a Senate trial.
I’ve been asking for guesses about when the first impeachment resolution will be filed in the House (leave your prediction here). To be fair, I’ve already been wrong about one thing — I predicted that Michele Bachmann would have introduced a resolution by now (actually, I predicted April 15). So perhaps I’m just as much of an alarmist as those Republicans who believed that a Pelosi-led House would impeach George W. Bush in 2007. Perhaps! But I don’t think so. In fact, impeachment talk moved yesterday from Tea Party rallies to at least one Republican Member of the House, Darrell Issa. And Issa’s not an obscure backbencher; he’s the ranking Republican on Oversight and Government Reform, and he also sits on the Judiciary Committee.
Issa currently is calling the Sestak episode an impeachable offense. Seriously.