Faithless Execution. Andrew C McCarthy

Obama turned a blind eye in 2009 when the Iranian people were brutally crushed in an uprising against their totalitarian regime—jihadist terror’s leading state sponsor, whose anthem for over thirty years has been “Death to America.” Then, in 2013, he reached out to President Hassan Rouhani, the mullahs’ new front man. After years of lip-service assurance that Iran would not be permitted to become a nuclear-weapons power, Obama has cut an “interim” deal with the regime that enables Iran to continue enriching uranium and eviscerates years of UN Security Council resolutions barring Iran’s uranium enrichment activities. Rouhani triumphantly boasted in a tweet that the United States had “surrendered to Iranian nation’s will,” while the regime’s chief negotiator bragged that Iran “did not agree to dismantle anything”: not its centrifuges, not its ballistics program, not its nuclear program.¹¹

      The interim agreement is to be implemented under the terms of a memorandum of understanding between the two sides. Tehran insists that if people want to know what this memorandum says, they should read it—but the Obama administration refuses to release the text to the American people. You’ll just have to trust them. We do know for certain that Obama demanded no concessions on Iran’s promotion of jihadist terror, the main reason why allowing it to become a nuclear-weapons power is unacceptable. At least, it used to be.

      Back in Libya, Obama recklessly neglected the duty of a president and commander in chief to protect Americans serving overseas, a negligence that included the shocking failure to take responsive action while Americans were under a terrorist siege in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. The president, whose White House has refused to account for his whereabouts and activities during the hours of the Benghazi attack, was evidently busy preparing for the Las Vegas political fundraiser he flew off to the next day. Subordinates were left to sort out the jihadist murders of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, and the severe wounding of many others.

      With the November election looming and the president’s campaign rhetoric about decimating al-Qaeda becoming laughable, the White House endeavored to defraud the American people into believing that the Benghazi massacre was not a terrorist operation foreseeably carried out by al-Qaeda affiliates on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, but a spontaneous riot provoked by an anti-Muslim video. Susan Rice, Obama’s confidante and ambassador to the United Nations, went on the Sunday shows to weave the video yarn. Meanwhile, Michael Morell, a top CIA official with close ties to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, obligingly purged references to al-Qaeda in agency talking points used for briefings on the massacre. Morell later deceived Congress about his edits and the fact that they were done in coordination with the White House. The deceptive scheme included a trumped-up prosecution of the video producer on charges related to parole (or “supervised release”)—though obviously his real “crime” in the administration’s eyes was exercising his First Amendment rights.

      The Obama administration has also conspired with foreign elements to reduce the constitutional liberties of the American people. Since the start of his presidency, Obama has colluded with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (a 57-member bloc of countries with large Muslim populations plus the Palestinian territories) on an international resolution prohibiting speech that casts Islam in a negative light. Following the Benghazi massacre, Obama shamefully compounded this campaign with not only the heinous prosecution of the aforementioned filmmaker but also (a) a television commercial (directed at Middle Eastern, not American, audiences) in which both he and Secretary of State Clinton slammed the film, and (b) an indignant proclamation in his annual United Nations speech that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Quite apart from their transparent suggestion that the film, not Obama’s policies, triggered the murders of American officials, these gambits continued the administration’s campaign to erode the First Amendment’s protection of free expression.

      The Second Amendment is threatened by the administration’s signing of a United Nations treaty on arms regulations in 2013, despite warnings by substantial bipartisan congressional majorities that there is no prospect of approval by two-thirds of the Senate, as constitutionally required for the pact to be ratified. The treaty would impose weapons-transfer regulations concocted by international bureaucrats—many of whom are anti-American and rabidly opposed to American firearms rights.

      Finally, the administration has exploited Obamacare to impose regulations that run roughshod over the First Amendment’s freedom-of-conscience guarantee. Religious believers, including religious organizations that self-insure, have been required to provide coverage for abortifacients (as well as other forms of birth control) despite their religious objections and the inexpensive, ubiquitous availability of these substances to those who desire them.

      There is more to say, in due course, about the administration’s performance. But this synopsis is enough, again, to press the question posed at that Montgomery County dinner gathering: “Why don’t we impeach him?”

      Senator Cruz’s response that evening was just as Lone Star blunt: “I’ll tell you the simplest answer. To successfully impeach a president you need the votes in the U.S. Senate. With Harry Reid and the Democrats controlling the Senate, it can’t succeed.”¹²

      Truer words were never spoken.

      Time to put the cards on the table: There is no doubt in my mind that President Obama ought to be impeached and removed from office. I believe the Constitution’s framework—in particular, the Framers’ ingenious separation and balancing of competing powers within the central government, and between that government and the sovereign states—is indispensable to liberty, which is so central to the American character. The Constitution, moreover, is the social compact. It established the solemn terms that induced the states to ratify our fundamental law and form a more perfect union. It answers the aspiration of our Declaration of Independence: to institute a government the powers of which derive solely from the consent of the governed and the limited purpose of which is to secure our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—not to rule us. It is history’s greatest proven generator of prosperity, security and human flourishing.

      The rise of the administrative state over the last century has profoundly challenged the Constitution’s framework, but President Obama has quite intentionally undertaken to dismantle that framework. That is what the president’s commitment to “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” is all about. President Obama seeks to agglomerate power in the federal executive branch, enabling him, without meaningful opposition, to remake our nation. No longer would it be based on liberty, with the citizen guaranteed protection from oppressive government. The Obama dream is the nightmare about which Alexis de Tocqueville warned: a comparatively soft tyranny, in which the individual serves an “immense and tutelary” state and its centrally planned, punctiliously regulated society, enjoying only as much liberty as the government deigns to grant him.¹³

      While I vigorously oppose it, I do not begrudge the president his vision of the just society: government redistributing wealth, hyperregulating property so it is no longer private in any real sense, enforcing a perverse notion of equality in which unequal treatment is applied to achieve a humanly unachievable equality of outcomes, and dramatically downsizing America’s role on the world stage. What I object to is the president’s pursuing these ends by violating his oath to preserve the Constitution, shredding the separation of powers, using the vast bureaucracy to repress his political opponents, and misleading the public about both his objectives and his failures. I believe the president should be impeached because I am not confident the nation can withstand nearly three more years of his governance. Oh, we would still be here, of course, but it would be a very different country, with the president having set precedents for worse to come.

      Many Obama critics look hopefully to the 2014 midterm elections, calculating that a Republican landslide will put the GOP in control of both houses of Congress, which would purportedly derail Obama’s onslaught and end the constitutional crisis. This is wishful thinking. Even if we assume for argument’s sake that Republicans will have a big electoral victory in the fall, there would be little prospect of stopping the president.

      Right now, Republicans control the House of Representatives, in which the Constitution vests primacy on taxing and spending.