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Rep. Blake Farenthold was forced to explain to voters back home in Texas district that while he thinks there's enough votes in the House of Representatives to impeach President Obama, there's no chance it'll happen because Democrats and Republicans can't get along well enough to get anything done. Yes, if not for the partisan gridlock in D.C., Farenthold, a Republican, assured his constituents that the president would be put on trial over his birth certificate.

In the exchange, which was caught on smartphone and posted Monday morning by BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski, Farenthold explained, "if we were to impeach the president tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it. But it would go to the Senate and he wouldn’t be convicted." Just as gridlock has doomed a grand bargain on taxes and maybe an immigration bill, what would undoubtedly be a wildly partisan trial of the president just can't get done because of partisan bickering.

Farenthold made the comments on Saturday during an open house at a civic center in Luling, Texas in answer to a constituent who acknowledged that she was presenting him with a "not very popular issue" — Obama's "fraudulent" birth certificate. The congressman explained, “I think unfortunately the horse is already out of the barn on this, on the whole birth certificate issue. The original Congress when his eligibility came up should have looked into it and they didn’t. I’m not sure how we fix it." The constituent, who's off camera but has a female voice, said she was holding proof that a felony had been committed. How could we let Obama get away with it? That's what lead to Farenthold's comments about impeachment. "You tie into a question I get a lot, if everyone’s so unhappy with the president’s done, why don’t you impeach him?" Farenthold told a constituent, before giving a "real frank answer" that the House and Senate would never come together to get impeachment done.