The headline was New GOP Leader Won’t Take Impeachment Off The Table (by Zach Carter, Huffingtonpost.com, July 27, 2014) but in fact it’s obvious that incoming GOP House Whip Steve Scalise was just clumsily trying to avoid the subject in his Fox News Sunday interview with Chris Wallace, no doubt because substantial majorities of Republicans—57% according to this recent CNN/ORC poll—want Obama impeached. Symptomatic of Scalise’s sell-out: in the same interview, he ruled out a government shut-down, although the power of the purse is about the only other hold legislators have on the Executive Branch.

But it no longer matters what the GOP House Leadership wants. (They seem to want to pass a “small” border crisis bill—to which, of course, Amnesty/ Immigration Surge could then be attached in conference). The White House has signaled it intends to ratchet up its Administrative Amnesty in defiance of law and the GOP, And, as the heroic Rep. Steve King responded, this could well “ ‘cause a thunderclap of eruption in Congress and from the American people’ that Republicans will not be able to ignore” (Rep. Steve King Predicts Impeachment If Obama Grants Executive Amnesty, by Tony Lee, Breitbart.com, July 26, 2014).

In the words of VDARE.com’s James Kirkpatrick: “Seemingly without warning, the crisis is at hand.”

Impeachment has come a long way since I posted Obama’s Border Dissolution Is Treason. The Answer Is Impeachment. It Would Workon July 6. To summarize my argument:

Needless to say, the big news since I wrote has been Sarah Palin’s endorsement of impeachment and her repeated defense of the tactic in the face of extraordinary (even by her standards) elite hostility.

It’s always been obvious that Palin sends a powerful implicit signal to the historic American nation. She has shown imagination and courage, for example facing down the Ruling Class’s developing witch-hunt of conservatives after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting by describing as a “blood libel” the claim that they were somehow implicated. Now she is showing both superior legal understanding—see also Sarah Palin is right about impeaching President Obama, by Ruth Marcus, Washington Post, July 15 2014—and a grasp of the immigration issue’s political potential.

Thus in her July 27 Facebook post Palin writes:

Let’s go around the media filters and acknowledge this ourselves: many Americans haven’t heard what impeachable offenses really are; but when they do, more citizens will rise up to hold their government accountable… The Constitution says “high crimes and misdemeanors” are the basis for this serious remedy. The Framers used that term to mean a dereliction of duty, and the first duty of the president is to enforce our laws and preserve, protect, and defend our Constitution. Alexander Hamilton described impeachable offenses as “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” He called them “political” offenses because they “relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” No serious person who is paying attention can deny that Obama and his administration have abused and violated the public trust and the Constitution. The White House is counting on the fact that Americans think impeachment is for committing a crime under the penal code. most Americans aren't aware of what constitutes impeachable offenses.

And

The American worker is the forgotten man in this crisis of Obama’s making. None other than Cesar Chavez affirmed that illegal immigration hurts hardworking Americans as it drives down the wages of our workers seeking good jobs to support their families.most Americans aren't aware of what constitutes impeachable offenses.

Of course, legal immigration also “hurts hardworking Americans.” But give Palin time—she’s making a National Conservative argument here. She’s come a long way too.

Nevertheless, it’s painfully apparent that most Republicans are scared stiff of impeachment. [What Obama Has To Gain By Being Impeached| Congressmen warn president may be saying, 'Make my day', by Drew Zahn, WND.com, July 27, 2014). Let’s address their concerns

Is there an alternative to impeachment?

Sure there is!—several, in fact. Thus the Washington Examiner’s generally sound Byron York asks nervously Instead of impeachment, can House vote to overturn Obama executive order?and answers Yes (although conceding that Senate Democrats would still block it). Indeed, no legislation at all is needed to amend the 2008 Trafficking law that the Obama Administration claims prevents the deportation of Central American children: the President already has the authority to suspend it. And, of course, the House has the power of the purse (although the GOP leadership has eschewed it, see above).

The problem: with the possible exception of defunding government operations, no mere technical measure can compel the Obama Administration’s attention and take over national debate—as impeachment, and the Senate trial, certainly would.

But there are certainly some major initiatives that would cause a splash—and embarrass the Democrats in the fall elections:

Abolish birthright citizenship.

Ending the “anchor baby” misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment would mean that the children born to illegal aliens would no longer automatically be U.S. citizens and strike at the jugular of the Treason Lobby’s attempt to swamp the historic American nation and convert the country onto a Minority/Majority footing. It would also, of course, shut off a powerful magnet to further illegal immigration.

Naturally, the Democrats would go berserk. But polls have shown for years that birthright citizenship for illegals’ children is very unpopular with Americans and Rasmussen Reports recently found (July 10, 2014) that ending birthright citizenship is now viewed as the single most important step to ending illegal immigration—even more than building a border wall (48% to 36%). Ironically, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid himself once opposed birthright citizenship for illegals, saying in 1993 “no sane country would do that.” In 2010, Republican immigration enthusiasts even briefly touted abolition in a ploy to re-elect John McCain and lull opposition to Amnesty.

Quite possibly, without a serious effort encouraging “self-deportation,” this would mean a permanent population of aliens unable to vote. Which would merely put the U.S. in the position of Switzerland, which denies its far larger alien population the vote and as a result gets to control its own national affairs.

Legalize Drugs

Ending the drug prohibition is obviously much more controversial, but it would certainly strike at the drug smugglers who also control illegal alien smuggling. It would also, presumably, earn the approval of the New York Times, although curiously its recent much-trumpeted Repeal Prohibition, Again editorial [July 26, 2014] did not cite the impact on illegal immigration.

Invade Central America. Well, why not?

As usual when they don’t want to do anything about an embarrassing problem, Democrats are looking for a “root cause.” In the case of the border surge, they claim it’s the supposedly parlous state of Central America. [Harry Reid says deporting immigrant kids won’t solve the border crisis, by Pete Kasperowicz, The Blaze, June 21, 2014].

Senator Reid actually urges that the U.S. spend “more money to address the violence in Central America.” A modest proposal: why not spend more money to address the violence by invading and imposing peace and good government? El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have a land area of 93, 000 square miles, about the size of Michigan, and a population of 29 million, roughly that of New York and New Jersey. How hard could it be?

It is a measure of how divorced America’s Ruling Class has become from any concern for the national interest that this proposal, which for most of U.S. history would have been the country’s natural response to trouble in its hemisphere, is not even being discussed. (I can find no sign of it on Google). It’s not as if military interventions aren’t being constantly urged in Washington—in Libya, in Syria, in the Ukraine etc. And the contrast with the enormous and protracted commitment to war in Afghanistan and Iraq is frankly scandalous.

But then, this is a Ruling Class that cannot bring itself to seize the Coronado Islands and end illegal alien smuggling onto the very doorsteps of San Diego’s great Navy and Marine bases.

Is impeachment a trap?

Certainly the Democrats are fundraising on the threat of impeachment—even I’m getting email solicitations!—and it may very well motivate their base. (Obama impeachment talk coming from inside the White House, by Alexander Panetta, The Canadian Press, July 27, 2014).

But impeachment will also motivate the GOP base. And the GOP base has not been motivated for a long time—turnout was down in both of the last Presidential elections.

As with Amnesty, the possibility must be entertained that Democrat/ Main Stream Media advice on what would be in the GOP’s best interest may not be wholly sincere.

Similarly, aversion to impeachment among Conservatism Inc. and RINO types—the Wall Street Journal Edit Page here, the Daily Beast’s appalling John Avlon, a former Rudy Giuliani speechwriter, here—is correlated with a dogmatic immigration enthusiasm, which would be completely undercut by the inevitable pitched battle on the subject in the Senate trial.

I think it’s at least as likely that the ideologues in the Obama Administration are simply determined to overwhelm the historic American nation while they can—and that they expect to be impeached because impeachment is what they themselves would do in the circumstances. We know this because that is exactly what they began to prepare to do when it looked like the Supreme Court might overturn Obamacare.

Wild ideas come easily to the plaintiffs’ attorneys, academics and assorted sociopaths who make up the Democratic Party. The Republicans’ small town lawyers and businessmen—Scalise was a systems engineer, Boehner in packaging and plastics sales—just don’t have the imagination.

But, imaginative or not, both parties have to get used to confrontational politics. America is bifurcating. An irrepressible conflict is developing—between the historic American nation and what I have called “Anti-America,” the coalition of minorities, many recently imported by immigration policy, and Leftists, many of them the descendants of the 1880-1924 Great Wave of immigration. It’s a fight to the death, which only one side yet realizes. This explains, among other things, the intensifying Politically Correct repression and the repeated anti-racist hysterias, ultimately aimed at keeping patriotic immigration reform out of politics until the historic American nation is drowned.

Which brings me to my conclusion: drowning the historic nation is treason. , Three weeks ago, I checked Google News for mentions of “Treason” vs. “Racism.” Result: 6, 190 vs. 917,000. Now it’s 4,760 vs. 714,000—and half a dozen of the “Treason” references are a crazy black Georgetown law (!) professor, Michael Eric Dyson,[Email him] claiming Palin’s criticisms of Obama are treasonous. That ratio has to be reversed. Specifically, opponents of Obama’s border surge have to start using the t-word.

It can be done. Who was talking about impeachment when VDARE.com began covering it?

Peter Brimelow [Email him] is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, is now available in Kindle format.