Going to try to predict the future… Obama will be impeached by Halloween

Going to try to predict the future… Obama will be impeached by Halloween.

The government will stay shut down until Oct 17th. With minutes to go before defaulting on the debt Obama will invoke the 14th amendment* and pay the bills we owe.

The following days the tea party will gleefully froth up more resentment and hate against the “dictator” Obama and impeach him over the use of the 14th amendment**.

The impeachment will fail in the Senate, but it will make great news cycles for the next year. The tea party radicals will win praise and cash from their sponsors and will win re-election in their own districts. It will be a fund raising bloodbath for any candidate in contestable races outside of the hopelessly gerrymanded. Who wins the house is still a toss up for 2014.

The defunding of the non-critical sectors of the government will go on until at least November. It will only stop when the constituents in the tea party districts notice that they are missing enough services. That would actually be a little while, since they will not care about EPA, NSF, FDA, etc. But the Farm bill has not been signed and big agriculture is not equipped for a free market of wild price swings, I see that as the first lever. Second the military contractors attached to the military bases will begin to agitate in frustration with the chaotic loss of revenue. They will rally the local communities to agitate for re-funding the government. But we could be shut down for a while. Unlike the 21 day shutdown with Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich planned for future shutdowns to make them more “orderly” and “palatable”. The loss of the National Parks would not be painful to the tea party districts for quite a while. When the airlines safety inspections queue gets long enough there will be more and more groundings of the fleet and when the public at large sees their own lives directly inconvenienced with more late flights and cancelled flights, then people will start getting grumpy - that could affect the 2014 mid-terms.***

*Obama has stated multiple times he will not invoke the 14th, so why do I think he will? First Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi have strongly advocated that it is legal and he should do it, second the markets are remarkably calm despite this shutdown chaos, so that leads me to think that the masters of the universe are not worried. Third, it is just common sense - world-wide economic calamity or spend sometime with the Supreme Court? Easy decision - and we already know that in 2008-2009 the government will act with extraordinary powers and in secret if the world markets are at stake. 14th amendments seems like an easy lay-up.

** As for the impeachment, this too is easy to call. The House can safely call for impeachment to grandstand and raise campaign dollars without fear that they would actually cause true damage because it will not pass the Senate. They will look like hometown heros for months - maybe years of making hay.

*** I would be curious to hear your list of non-critical government services that the tea party constituents will feel pain over?

Originally posted on Facebook on October 01, 2013.