Via TPM, John McCain
says that Republicans won't remove President Obama from office "even if we believed that it was warranted" because they don't have enough votes:
The fact is that we're not going to impeach the president because we don't have 67 votes in the United States Senate in order to do so.
McCain mangled his terminology there, because the Senate doesn't vote on impeachment—that's up to the House. Instead, the Senate would hold an impeachment trial if the House voted to impeach the president. Convicting Obama would require 67 votes, and nobody has ever suggested that there's any chance he'd be convicted. So while McCain did manage to get
the headline he probably wanted, he didn't actually say anything that wasn't already universally accepted as obviously true.
But he did support the House's decision to sue the president:
But I do think a lawsuit filing, about the president's abuse of power, which he has clearly done—some 55 times, or whatever it is, on Obamacare alone—I think that's a good idea.
And he also said he believes Obama is the biggest lawbreaker ever to sit in the Oval Office, at least that he can remember:
I do believe that this president has broken more laws, by executive order—well, let me put it this way: I believe that he has abused the executive branch in a way that I don't recall any other president doing.
So on the one hand, McCain told us what we already knew: That there aren't enough votes in the Senate to convict Obama of impeachment. But he also added something we didn't know: That he believes Obama is the most lawless president that he can remember.
Good to know.