IMPEACHMENT OF THE PRESIDENT? WOULD THAT ALSO COUNT AS "BOTH SIDES ARE TO BLAME"?

Bill Clinton is right, and New York Times op-ed writers Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule are right -- the president should cut the crap and raise the debt limit on his own. We're now in a situation where he may literally be damned if he does and damned if he doesn't -- there are threats to impeach him if he does anything other than accede to 100% of Republicans' demands (because, let's face it, that's the only way we're going to get a deal through the usual channels).

Congressman Steve King of Iowa now threatens impeachment if the debt ceiling isn't raised:

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said Monday that President Barack Obama "would be impeached" if the nation falls into default.

"STOP talking about default," he wrote on Twitter. "The 1st dime of each $1 of revenue services debt. Obama would be impeached if he blocked debt payments. C C & B!"

King is among the House Republicans who voted for the so-called "Cut, Cap and Balance" plan that would introduce a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget. The Senate last week dismissed the House bill....

A couple of weeks ago, a first-year teabagger congressman named Tim Scott threatened impeachment if Obama does raise the debt ceiling in a unilateral fashion:

While some have asserted that the debt limit might be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, and therefore President Obama does not need congressional approval to raise it, Republicans have been quick to express skepticism over the idea. On Tuesday, a Republican congressman went a step further, saying that if Obama were to use that argument to bypass Congress on the issue, it would be an impeachable offense.

"This president is looking to usurp congressional oversight to find a way to get it done without us. My position is that is an impeachable act from my perspective," said Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) at a meeting sponsored by the Tea Party group LowCountry 9.12 Project on Tuesday, first reported by Lindsay Street on Summerville Patch.

His comments were met with enthusiastic applause....

I said it when Scott spoke and I'll say it again: impeachment would be a good thing. It would bring into relief precisely what we're dealing with: not a system that's broken down because "everybody's to blame," but a system that's being destroyed by a specific cabal of sociopaths known as the Republican Party, who want system failure, or at least the risk of it, because it serves their ends, namely tax cuts for the wealthy and, in the long term, the conversion of the United States into a cheap-labor, no-social-safety-net banana republic that has "a good business climate" reminiscent of those in third world nations.

We're going to keep heading inexorably in that direction until it's generally understood by our political culture, and by the voting public, that America as we know it cannot continue to exist if the GOP as it currently exists continues to wield any power. A few people in the middle are vaguely starting to grasp that fact. Impeachment might just make it clear that we live in a state of Republican total war against anything that's not Republican.

Or, well, the mainstream press might just explain impeachment away with choruses of "Too bad we no longer live in a world where Ronnie Reagan and Tip O'Neill have a drink at the end of the day and talk Irish blarney." But at least there's some chance that impeachment without any semblance of an impeachable offense would smack some sense into America.

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(Steve King link via Memeorandum.)