Now, apparently lacking an amusing cartoon page, the Wacka-wacka-WHOOOooo-nutjob-Dumbasses have come up with a new conspiracy to entertain and terrify their extremist readers. With the right wingers, terrifying conspiracy theories are for them like masturbation is for much of the rest of the world's population, a more or less guilty pleasure that gives them a similar thrill.
There is nothing quite so crazy as those far right extremists who read or write the World Nut Daily. We just recently chronicled how fake preacher and hate group leader Bradlee Dean promoted the nutty hateful conspiracy that the United States was responsible for killing the kids and teachers in Connecticut, in order to......oh who knows or cares, he never makes sense anyway.
Later this month President Obama will retake the oath of office, following his substantial defeat of the right wing nuts. The crazies at the World Noose Dipshits want to impeach Chief Justice Roberts if he administers the oath of office. I detect the unique incompetent influence of failed dentist, lawyer and realtor batshit crazy Birther queen Orly Taitz!
Because the tea partiers are so uniquely badly educated, I always enjoy correcting them with a little factual education. It hasn't helped their spelling any, so far, but at least it provides them an opportunity to improve their history education which is at least as bad, if not worse, than their language skills.
So lets review the impeachment of Supreme Court Justices. It is the same for any Justice, there is no special provision for Chief Justice. There has been only one attempt in our history to impeach a member of the SCOTUS, back in the golden era of our founding fathers, when the nation was young and foolish, as distinct from the tea party demographic of old and senile. That was Justice Samuel Chase during the administration of Thomas Jefferson in 1805.
The attempt to impeach Chase gives an outline of the proposal to impeach Roberts. The House of Representatives has to issue the bills of impeachment by a simple majority vote, according to Article 1, Section 3- in the case of Chase, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, there were seven articles of impeachment. The trial of Chase then moved to the Senate, presided over by then VP Aaron Burr. (Just a reminder that Burr was Veep not because he ran for that office, but because the loser candidate in those days got the job; Burr lost to Jefferson after they tied for electoral votes, and the tie outcome was decided by the House of Representatives. Readers might also remember that Burr shot down his own subsequent political career by shooting and killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, and then moved on from murder to attempted treason.) The Senate, presided over by VP Burr acquitted Justice Chase on all counts. There were some minor procedural changes made to the process in 1986, but the bones of the process are still the same; it takes a super-majority two-thirds vote of the Senate to remove someone who is impeached from office.
No other presiding Justice has ever been impeached, although during the McCarthyism scare of the latter 1950s, some other right wing nuts, enjoying the orgasmic thrill of that era's conspiracy insanity, did try in Georgia to get a whole benchfull of Justices impeached for being activist Justices, accusing them of enabling Communism with their decisions. That bunch were avid 'tenthers'/states rightist righties, not unlike the would-be secessionist of our era. Just for a little context for comparison to how crazy extremists were then and now, the crazy John Birchers back in the day also believed President Eisenhower was a communist agent working for the Soviet Union, and that his brother was his spy-handler. It does always seem to be the conservative extremists who come up with the best ways to scare themselves and each other. No other Justice has ever been impeached since the 1805 attempt to remove Sam Chase.
I suppose it is too much to hope that Roberts could be impeached; it would be great fun to have President Obama have the opportunity to appoint another member of the SCOTUS. But you have to wonder why it is that the Teabaggers and other right wing extremists so hate America and our representative government that they want to negate the value and validity of all the votes cast by their fellow Americans. It's terribly unpatriotic of them.
From the HuffPo:
Birthers Suggest Impeaching Chief Justice John Roberts
The birther movement is now targeting Chief Justice John Roberts for impeachment if he swears in President Barack Obama for a second term later this month.
Craige McMillan, a columnist for the conservative publication WND.com, wrote a piece last week asking Roberts to not swear Obama in, because, according to McMillan, Obama does not meet the Constitution's definition of a natural born citizen. In the piece, McMillan claims that Obama is not a citizen because his father was a citizen of Kenya and the United Kingdom, and that Obama cannot be "a natural born citizen" because his father was not an American citizen. Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born and raised in Kansas by parents who were born in Kansas.
McMillan wrote:
Your failure to investigate these citizenship issues surrounding Mr. Obama at the time questions were raised during his first term places you in a terrible position. You are now confronted with a most difficult choice. Your own oath of office, sworn before God and the American people, requires you to uphold the Constitution. (If not you, then who?) If you now administer the oath of office for the presidency to a man who by his own admission fails to meet the natural born citizen requirement imposed by that Constitution, you have violated your own oath of office and are rightly subject to impeachment by any House of Representatives, at any time, now or in the future.you can read more here about Orly Taitz's part in the nonsense.
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