'I’m the guy doing my job,' Obama says. Obama on impeachment: 'Really?'

Go ahead, President Barack Obama told House Republicans Thursday. Impeach him.

“You hear some of them: ‘Sue him! Impeach him!’” Obama said in a relaxed, sniping campaign-style speech in Austin, Texas, recounting the resistance he’s run into for signing executive actions. “Really? For what, doing my job?”


So punchy that he was leaning arms hanging off the front of his podium, telling a few hecklers to “sit down,” and instructing the Secret Service not to bother removing them, Obama said he was feeling liberated.

( Also on POLITICO: GOP to Akin: Shut up)

“I don’t have to run for office anymore, so I can just let it rip,” he said.

And rip he did, after days of Republicans beating him up for not doing anything on the border but refusing to pass the money to pay for what he wants to do on the border.

For months, Democratic polling has shown that when Obama says “Congress,” people hear “Republicans.” Thursday, he made that explicit, saying that while Democrats in Congress aren’t perfect, he believed Americans knew it was Republicans who weren’t on their side.

“The best thing you can say about” the House GOP, Obama said, is that, so far this year, “they haven’t shut down the government. … But it’s only July.”

And then he launched into an extended mocking of them for the lawsuit House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is threatening to bring against him for using executive action. He also offered stats that show George W. Bush signed many more executive orders and pulled in a quote from Mark Wahlberg’s character in Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed.”

“I’m the guy doing my job,” Obama said, getting the line almost right. “You must be the other guy.”

“Think about that,” he told the crowd. “You’re going to use taxpayer money to sue me for doing my job while you don’t do your job.”