How Do You Impeach A Party?

by JASmius

More brutal reality my Tea Party friends are not going to like:

A president’s flouting of the Constitution, sustained by his party, is precisely the danger that Obama and the Democratic Party are bringing upon America. Let us look closely at the joint nature of this enterprise.

No one in the Democratic Party has evinced the slightest opening to the possibility that he or she might consider seriously the merits of accusations that president Obama has refused to enforce laws that are on the books or that he has enforced laws contrary to the wording of those very laws. On the contrary: the Party seems quite united in the proposition that anything at all that its president might do in the service of its constituencies’ desires is cause for celebration. No exceptions.

How is any opponent of those desires to regard this? Impeaching Obama misses the bigger part of the problem, namely a Democratic party so partisan that it places its desires above the Constitution. This party not only supports its own executive regardless of the Constitution but, in the past, was ready and willing (but it lacked the requisite majority) to remove the opposite party’s president simply because it disagreed with him. Quite simply, the Democratic Party is moving beyond the Constitution because a majority of its voters is doing so. But how does one impeach a party that represents a substantial part of the body politic?

What is the solution? The Constitution offers only the prayer that patriotic good sense will prevail. But in its absence? The Hydra-like Administrative State in which we now live offers so many temptations to stick it to one’s least favorite people as to render it unlikely that rival sectors of society will divorce amicably and agree to let the other live in its own way. Most likely, we will get one form or another of what Woodrow Wilson wanted: alternating governments by parties so partisan as to unite legislative and executive power. It won’t be America. In fact, it’s already ceasing to be. [emphases added]

Aside from the tense of that last sentence, and the notion of "alternating governments" when the premise of Mr. Codevilla's argument precludes the party currently in possession of such power from ever voluntarily relinquishing it, precisely.  Or, as I keep saying, it's not about "cajones," or an unwillingness to "fight! fight! fight!; it's the cold, hard fact of numbers, and of the impracticability of using the law against a lawless president and his lawless party.

It's Civil War II, and we're bringing rocks to a gun fight.  We just don't know it yet.

But heaven knows we should.