On Wednesday’s “The O’Reilly Factor” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer advised Republicans not to be lured into seeking articles of impeachment against President Barack Obama, despite the seemingly flippant attitude the Obama has shown with regards to seeking congressional authority on certain issues, in particular immigration reform.
Host Bill O’Reilly alluded to the earlier post-election press conference in which Obama participated and said that he foresaw congressional Republicans, now in the majority, being forced to act against the president.
“You are absolutely right,” Krauthammer replied. “He is a strange combination of obliviousness and recklessness. It’s as if he doesn’t know what happens. I think he probably does. But he spent an hour and 13 minutes pretending he didn’t. That this was some kind of referendum on does Washington work. I mean, you know, you are going to pretend anti-incumbency election when all of the Democratic incumbents wiped out on Republican incumbents survive? So, he pretends it’s not that. But he is going to be reckless. I think he also is so sort of self-involved and he hates being sidelined. He hates what the Democrats did to him over the last year, making him irrelevant. Now he is going to sort of get his revenge on everybody. By doing a reckless thing, which is to legalize millions of illegal aliens, I would say unconstitutionally in a way that he knows is going to create a crisis. But what will it do? It puts him back in the limelight, puts him in the spotlight. It makes him the issue. What are we talking about tonight? We’re not talking about one. Most important elections in 20 years. We’re talking about him. That’s what he wants.”
O’Reilly said he saw Obama headed toward being impeached, but Krauthammer warned Republicans to stay disciplined and to not take the bait.
“Here’s what I think you should do,” Krauthammer said. “You should be very smart and disciplined. The prize here is not the impeachment of Obama and curtailing his term by three months. The prize is winning the White House in 2016 and changing the country. Now, the way to do it is you say this is unconstitutional, illegal. We are going to find every way we can to make sure that it is not funded, that this does not get a penny of the purse. It is illegal to enact anything by executive order unless you get some appropriation from the Congress. That’s number one. Number two, you say on the day of the swearing in in 2017 if we win the White House this is an executive order and it lives only as long as the next president does not cancel it. It will be canceled with the stroke of a pen. And then you say we’re going to look and hope that we can encourage private legal challenges to this action because the Supreme Court, the courts won’t take a case if it comes out of Congress. But that’s what you do. You don’t go for the bait. We know what happened with the Clinton impeachment. It cost the Republicans the ’98 election. It would be absolutely what Obama wants.”
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