You can’t count that high; the number of barrels of ink spilled, trees felled, fingers cramped on the digital highway of thought regarding President Obama’s failure to take care that laws be faithfully executed. Boil it down and it is this: impeachment is a populist political remedy to a provably lawless Executive; i.e. you must have the popular WILL to be right. Being right, merely legally correct, that a President has broken the law is not enough. You can be right all day long, every day, for two long terms of lawlessness but unless the ball-less wonders on the Hill have the wind at their back – you – holding torches and pitchforks, they will lay down like a Victorian bride and think of England.

So what to do? The Founders, remarkable in their vision for the Republic and the flaws of man, never envisioned an electorate so supine, a Hill so willing to be neutered, that they would need some remedy between lawlessness and removal. They figured, rightly until now, that the electorate wouldn’t stand for it (40 years ago popular will was drummed up to a fever pitch by a nascently liberal press to oust Republican Nixon) and that the Legislative Branch wouldn’t stand and cheer, as they did recently, when the Executive stood before them and announced he would go around them! It was a truly stunning moment for the Republic. What happened to these people? When did the species stand and cheer to have their balls cut off? How did this happen?

How we got here is a conversation for another day, but George Will has an excellent column on the state of affairs as they stand now & a possible solution somewhere between laying down and taking it and impeachment and I recommend the entire thing to you, but here, brilliantly, is his last paragraph, and thus, mine:

“Advocates of extreme judicial quietism to punish the supine people leave the people’s representatives no recourse short of the extreme and disproportionate “self help” of impeachment. Surely courts should not encourage this. The cumbersome and divisive blunderbuss process of impeachment should be a rare recourse. Furthermore, it would punish a president for anti-constitutional behavior but would not correct the injury done to the rule of law.”