OPINION:
The GOP’s new Enforce the Law Act does not involve the courts because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will never allow a vote on it — and President Obama would veto it, anyway (“House GOP passes ’Enforce the Law’ Act to battle Obama’s imperial presidency,” Web, March 12).
The whole effort is pointless because the Constitution already prescribes impeachment as the recourse available to Congress if a president acts outside the law.
Further, the GOP-held House has the direct capability to issue such articles. Impeachment articles would force the Senate to convene a trial, and the president to defend in detail each apparently unlawful action.
Recall that we have yet to see any specific reference to a law or clause in the Constitution that grants a U.S. president the right to change specific details in a “law of the land.”
In 1970, then-House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford defined the criterion for impeachment this way: “[A]n impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
One could even argue that the GOP’s new bill is unconstitutional because it appears to create an extraconstitutional path around the Senate for redressing claims of unlawful acts by a president.
BILL MILLS
Sterling, Va.
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