Congressional Republicans may have been watching a little too much
West Wing. Their hot new idea to avoid the self-inflicted political wound of impeachment while showing how very angry they are at President Obama's action on immigration is to censure him. It turns out, though, that this is an idea with a few problems. Even if the very serious political press said "oh, well, as long as it's not impeachment it's not unreasonable" and even if voters drew a clear distinction between censure and impeachment, Republicans
wouldn't necessarily be in the clear:
... there's one big problem with this plan: censuring the president might be unconstitutional. Or at least, any censure resolution that would meaningfully punish the president risks violating the Constitution, legal experts say.
"If you can put together in the abstract a resolution that does nothing more than express disapproval, I think it's possible for Congress to do that. But you can't do more than that," said Michael J. Gerhardt, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, who has written a law review article exploring the issue. "I think any impact beyond expression would pose a constitutional problem for the attempted censure."
Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said a congressional resolution to censure a president is not clearly authorized by the Constitution, "so a strict constitutionalist would say that it's an action beyond the authority of Congress."
The
West Wing plot, wherein a president makes a deal to accept censure, might be constitutional, maybe. But why would Obama make a deal to accept censure for executive actions he had determined were legal? Just because Republicans were outraged? In that case, we'd be looking at more than one censure, because being outraged is more than a full-time job for these characters, it's a vocation.
Not to mention that voters probably would notice that Congress was doing something virtually unprecedented (one president in history has been censured by one chamber of Congress, and that was later expunged). Just because it's not impeachment doesn't mean there would be some kind of cloak of invisibility that would let Republican base voters see that their politicians were Doing Something while keeping Democrats and swing voters from noticing that Republicans had gone off the flipping deep end.
That's likely the reasoning behind the latest rumor: House Republicans may be holding a "disapproval vote," like some sort of extremely sternly worded letter that falls short even of censure. Sounds like just the thing for a lot of email blasts talking about how Rep. Farright really took it to the president and deserves lots of contributions, doesn't it?
7:36 AM PT: At a press conference, Speaker John Boehner said that "we're looking at a variety of options" but "no decisions have been made at this point." I guess that means they're still fighting about it.