Most of the folks here at DKos are Dems, liberals or progressives. Most of us can agree that there is a substantial group of team R that claims they want to impeach the President.
Frankly, though arguments about Obamacare have always been a joke, recent revelations about the NSA and administration's disregard for the Constitution give Republicans the ammunition they need to levy a case for impeachment.
How and whether or not they use it will fill volumes about who truly owns the Republican party.
More below the fold....
I think the requirements to bring a standing President up on charges of impeachment--high crimes and misdemeanors, etc--are pretty well understood within the DKos community, so I'm not going to waste space outlining legal matters. I think most legal scholars would agree that direct violation of the Constitution would fit the bill, however.
Has the President done so? Well, it depends on who you ask. Many would argue that "freedom of the press" is tenuous nowadays, and others would perhaps agree that "freedom of speech" doesn't exist when electronic communications are routinely monitored. The 4th amendment guarantee against unjustified "search and seizure" is another hook that team R could hang their hat on, if they were so inclined.
But are they interested in doing so?
If the Republican party is truly the party of "small government" and "individual liberty", then we're going to see charges of impeachment forthwith--not necessarily because the President has crossed a line, but because a case could most certainly be made that he has violated his oath of office.
But what of the fall-out?
If the President were to be impeached over NSA monitoring, it would raise very...interesting...questions about the very existence of such monitoring. In turn, questions would likely be raised about the role of the miltary - industrial - surveillance complex...folks that team R supports with rare exceptions. Frankly, if team R were to impeach the President over NSA monitoring, life could become...inconvenient...for the folks who make millions or billions of dollars through such monitoring.
What we see over the coming months will tell volumes about the ideological consistency of Team R. Anyone care to place bets on the outcome?