Pat Buchanan Calls for Bush Impeachment
Pat Buchanan is rapidly becoming the Lyndon LaRouche of the new millennium with the endless, hopeless presidential campaigns, marginalized views and disproportionate media exposure, likely because of the novelty factor inherent to them. Buchanan's latest claim? Bush needs to be impeached, though not because of Iraq or wiretapping, but because of his views on immigration.
BUCHANAN: I think the president is not going to be impeached, but he's guilty of an impeachable offense. The Constitution commands the president of the United States to defend the states from an invasion.
When he himself says six million people have been stopped, we don't know how many have gotten in. Most people think about half that number. You've got an invasion.
He hasn't been enforcing the immigration laws and he hasn't been defending the border against an invasion, John. He ain't going to be impeached, because the Democrats are going along with the program, because both of them are beholden to the same corporate people right down there on K Street who want limitless immigration and who want cheap labor, and who want to be able to go abroad and bring in foreign workers into this United States.
So I think that the president of the United States has been derelict in his duty, unlike Dwight Eisenhower who put together something calledoperation wetback" excuse me, on the border when he had a million immigrants coming in from Mexico. He said we have to stop this, he sent down a general to do it, and they deported those folks. Something has happened to the elites in this country if they can't defend America's border.
I've been reading Article II of the constitution and can't find any section that describes any sort of presidential obligation to "defend the states from an invasion," so I'd say that Buchanan is on shaky legal ground, at best, if he attempts to pursue impeachment. That and with a Republican majority in the Senate it seems unlikely than an impeachment vote would pass.
But it doesn't matter - Buchanan's true colors had already been shown before he made that idiotic remark, and they have nothing to do with presidential obligations.
KING: If the border were secured and through legal immigration California became a majority Hispanic, majority Latino, Texas became a majority, do you have a problem with that if they came in through legal immigration?
BUCHANAN: Yes, I do. Yes, I do. Because of the Mexican situation Mexico has a claim on this country, John.
Our Irish ancestors, Italian ancestors, Jewish folks, they didn't say, look, this belongs to us. That (INAUDIBLE), what did you have 500,000 to a million people? They're under Mexican flags. They say, "This is our land."
You had 90,000 people in the coliseum in a soccer game in California, in L.A. What happened? When the Mexican team came out they booed the American flag, they tore down -- excuse me, tore down the American flag, booed our national anthem, threw garbage on the American team.
You've got a tremendously rising militant group among Mexicans in this country which is documented there, and if we don't wake up to it, we're risking the breakup of our country. T.R. warned against this, Wilson warned against it. Half the great Americans do.
So he's even against legal immigration because "they" all somehow feel like "the country belongs to us." Forget the fact that it would be hard to find anyone who actually thinks that way (and Buchanan offers not a single shred of evidence to back up his assertion), but this is the exact same argument that was leveled against Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century, Italians at the beginning of the twentieth, and pretty much every other ethnic group that has decided to emigrate to the US en masse since its formation. And it's always been the same lame cover for simple racism and xenophobia.
The more important question is: "Why do we care what Pat Buchanan thinks?" Is his opinion representative of anyone but himself anymore? He's a miserable failure of a politician who has managed to claw his way into the limelight more often than he deserves. Even if he is against Bush it's for all the wrong (and poorly conceived) reasons. It's still no reason to give him air time when actual adults might have useful things to say.
Hat Tip: AmericaBlog
