He's done everything else up to that point. So why not?
President Obama, understanding that the Republican House of Representatives has essentially abdicated its responsibility to govern, has
signaled his intention to use executive authority to actually accomplish things on behalf of the American people, such as a minimum wage increase for federal contractors. Speaker Boehner, meanwhile, has apparently realized that once you've obstructed everything and shut down the government, you have no
leverage left of the ordinary variety. So it sounds like he's
threatening impeachment instead:
The House GOP "will continue to look closely at whether the president is faithfully executing laws, as he took an oath to do,” Boehner told reporters after a meeting of the Republican conference. “We’re going to watch very closely, because there’s a Constitution that we all take an oath to, including him, and following the Constitution is the basis for House Republicans.”
Asked what the House would do if lawmakers determined Obama skirted the Constitution, Boehner said only, “There are options that are available to us.” Republicans, he said, would discuss them at their annual retreat, which begins Wednesday in Cambridge, Md.
Was this an impeachment threat? It's hard to read it any other way, given the fact that the House has done everything short of that in their attempts to make Obama's presidency a failure. So this is where we're at: Speaker Boehner is telling Obama that his presidency will be useless, and if he tries to make it anything other than useless, he will resort to options that haven't yet been used. And there aren't very many of those left on the table now, are they?