The Right-Wing Pushes Back: No, We Really Do Want Impeachment

As many in the conservative media grow more insistent that the Republican Party will not and should not impeach President Obama, major right-wing figures have started pushing back to keep the impeachment option on the table.

Over the past few weeks many mainstream conservatives such as the Republican congressional leadership and many Fox News personalities have dismissed the idea of impeaching the president, going so far as to shift the blame for the discussion of impeachment to the White House and other Democrats. This dishonest narrative was taken up by some mainstream reporters, despite the fact that conservatives and Republicans have long called for Obama's impeachment. 

While some in the conservative media pretend this is all a cynical ploy by Democrats, not everyone is ready to give up the goal of impeaching the president.

Mark Levin

On the July 29 edition of The Mark Levin Show, Mark Levin said during a six minute long rant about impeachment:

LEVIN: Our country is being destroyed. And I am sick and tired of people like Speaker Boehner, Minority Leader McConnell, various radio hosts and TV commentators going on and on about our imperial president, how it's outrageous  how what he is doing is destructive to the Constitution and the country, and then when you bring up what the Constitution provides us, it's “oh, what a bunch of kooks.”

[...]

Here's the dead truth -- Obama should be impeached. But he won't be impeached. Obama should be impeached if the Republicans take the Senate. But he won't be impeached if Republicans take the Senate. Obama has committed high crimes and misdemeanors by violating the Constitution.

Rush Limbaugh

On the July 30 edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show, Rush Limbaugh criticized Speaker of the House John Boehner for taking impeachment “off the table”:

LIMBAUGH: Boehner took it off the table if it was ever on the table. And I don't like all these things being taken off the table, by the way. We just said we're not going to shut the government down, so we're not going to use the power of the purse to stop Obama. OK. And now we're saying impeachment is off the table, so we're not going to use the Constitution to stop Obama. So the Republican Party is bragging or broadcasting that they are not going to do anything to stop Obama.

And I'll tell you why - because they too believe that the - they still believe, even with all the polling data, the plummeting approval numbers - that if there's any pursuit of Obama politically, that it's just going to send the independents running right to the Democrats in the midterms and all that. They really do believe even now that the public does not want to hear their dear leader criticized, they do not want to hear their dear leader subject to impeachment talks or what have you.

And so the Republicans are doing everything they can to tell people “we're not going to impeach, we're not going to.” It's purely defensive, it's rooted in fear, and I think it's a miscalculation.

Drudge Report

On July 29, the Drudge Report ran the following banner headline criticizing Boehner:

The conservative media have been at war with themselves since the publication of Sarah Palin's Breitbart.com piece calling for impeachment on July 8. Now that so many conservatives in the media have adopted Speaker Boehner's  new line that talk of impeachment is a “scam” created by Democrats, the schism between the right-wing and the mainstream conservatives grows larger.