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Mike Huckabee Renews Absurd Religious Attacks on President Obama

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You almost have to admire the chutzpah of Republicans like Mike Huckabee, who, as Jason Easley related yesterday, told Steve Deace what every other Republican says, that “There is no doubt that he [Obama] has done plenty of things worthy of impeachment.”

But “Things” is rather vague and no Republican has been able to actually give us a list of which “things” he is talking about (Huckabee says Obama weakened the border and created “lawlessness”), at least a list of things that are actually true.

But I was more struck by Huckabee’s other claim. His religiously charged claim that President Obama is “acting like God” and therefore “worthy of impeachment.” Here, “things” seems to be a subset of “acting like God” as in nonspecific things people do when they act like God.

In other words, Huckabee is trying to create religious grounds for impeachment, to put Obama’s alleged violations of the law in anti-God terms the base can get behind. Bad enough he’s a black man, Huckabee seems to be saying, but he’s a black man poking his finger in the eye of God. And for that reason he’s got to go. Remember, even the GOP has gotten behind the Religious Right’s idea that God established our borders.

While certainly appealing to the Republican base, which by now is well conditioned to think in these purely emotionally-charged terms, as in categories of things that either piss God off or make God happy, this charge carries no weight as an argument outside of a church.

Take a listen courtesy of Right Wing Watch:

“The government is going to have to secure the border. There’s a big difference between what we owe God and what we owe Caesar, and right now we’ve got Caesar acting like God.”

No doubt Huckabee thinks this a neat turn of phrase. But again, where is the connection? Certainly Jesus told his followers to give unto Caesar what is Caesars, but legally speaking, that has no relevance to impeachment since impeachment is per the Constitution, not the Bible.

Nor can any connection be made between Jesus’ words and border security in the 21st century.

What does giving unto Caesar have to do with Caesar acting like God? This assertion is not less vague than Huckabee’s “things” and it really doesn’t elaborate or explain the assertion that acting like God is a cause for impeachment.

Look at this claim for a minute: First of all, you have to prove Obama is “acting like God” which would certainly be no easy task because the question necessarily arises, how does God act as President? What constitutes acting like God?

Only God can answer that and he’s not made himself available to ask in a couple thousand years, even if you’re willing to swallow the New Testament whole, and even if the Bible were the law of the land.

Problematic doesn’t begin to cover it.

Second, it does not follow that even if Obama is found to be acting like God, that acting like God is against the law, let alone grounds for impeachment. That’s something the Constitution, because it was written to create a secular, not a religious government, does not address.

Here is what the Constitution says about impeachment:

The Constitution, Article II, Section 4:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Oh dear. No “acting like God” to be found.

And besides, there are plenty of people who act like God. Many Republicans among them.

In the end, the GOP is literally awash in a sea of the problematic, and they are forced into absurdities like suing Obama for not implementing a law fast enough that they themselves have voted to defund or repeal 50 times. They ought to be cheering him, not suing him.

So when you consider Huckabee’s claim that Obama deliberately weakened the border and created “lawlessness,” you have to ask yourself, in what sense is this true? For one thing, as we all know but they won’t admit, that they’re blaming Obama for the consequences of a 2008 law of the Bush administration.

And if you go back and look at the last few years, it is the Republicans who have weakened the border, not Obama. Even though Republicans stress the need for border security, according to ABC News, the Republican-controlled House, “approved a 2012 budget that seems to undermine that goal.”

The House voted mostly along party lines over the weekend to slash spending by an estimated $600 million for border security and immigration enforcement for the remainder of this fiscal year.

The budget allocates $350 million less for border security fencing, infrastructure and technology than Congress approved last year, and $124 million below what the Department of Homeland Security requested.

Huckabee told Steve Deace we need a fence. He should look to the House, which also cut funding for construction projects:

The bill also cuts an estimated $159 million over last year for Customs and Border Protection modernization and construction programs, and is $40 million less than the agency sought to get the job done.

In fact, Republican budget guru Paul Ryan, chair of the House Budget Committee, himself said of these cuts,

“We cannot continue down this path of having double- and triple-digit spending increases on government agencies. No matter how popular sounding these programs are, they mortgage our children’s future and they compromise our economic growth today.”

Oh dear. Securing the border, in Ryan’s words, “mortgages our children’s future.” Shouldn’t Ryan be the target of impeachment here, and not Obama?

And of course, just this year Democrats in the Senate voted for $2.7 billion in funding but Senate Republicans blocked it, and of course, the Republicans then accuse the Democrat-controlled Senate of inaction. Then, to mock the process and to insult the Latinos they so despise, they passed their own racist border bill, a bill Republicans know will never pass the Senate and will never be signed into law.

But through all this, President Obama is the guy in the wrong. Obama is the guy who needs to be impeached.

If anybody in government has not done their job, it is the Republican House of Representatives. That is who should be impeached for failing to secure the border and creating lawlessness.

This is where austerity gets you. Obama has told them if you want a job done you have to fund it, and Republicans know this, which is why they want to defund everything they don’t approve of.

Republicans also know somebody has to be blamed for their failures, and because they themselves are the guys who created the problem by underfunding the border, they need somebody else to blame. It’s their Benghazi ploy writ large (underfund embassy security and blame Obama for the results).

Who better – once again – than our first black president, who, through no coincidence, has been accused of being the Antichrist?

Unfortunately once again for Republicans, there is no law against being the Antichrist either.

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Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen's Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.

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