Impeachment lite

WITH terror threats on every side, how did Republicans—by tradition the party of national security—find themselves pondering a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)? The quick answer involves political calculation, and a desire among conservatives to be seen fighting President Barack Obama over his plans to shield millions of illegal immigrants from deportation with a few strokes of his pen.

A longer answer involves political weakness. In publicly contemplating a partial government shutdown—the first since the autumn of 2013—Republicans in the House of Representatives are pandering to their party’s angriest grassroots supporters, who have convinced themselves that Mr Obama is not just mistaken in his policies, but is a constitution-trampling tyrant.

Calling the president a serial law-breaker helped power Republicans to a thumping win in the mid-term elections last November, handing them control of both chambers of Congress. Since then, Republican leaders have united their fractious party by assailing the constitutionality of Mr Obama’s moves to grant temporary legal papers to more than 4m foreigners living in the country unlawfully, who were either brought to America as children, or who are the parents of citizens or legal residents. The charge has been led by John Boehner, the Speaker of the House—a man who, not so long ago, was derided by hardliners as an establishment squish.

The Speaker says that Republicans are duty-bound to fight Mr Obama with a weapon granted to Congress by the Founding Fathers—their powers over spending requested by the executive. In his words: “The Congress just can’t sit by and let the president defy the constitution and defy his own oath of office.”

Alas for Mr Boehner, the same Founding Fathers made sure those budget powers are both potent and hard to use. House Republicans have passed a bill that amounts to a precision attack on Mr Obama’s immigration agenda, surgically cutting money for what they call his “executive amnesty” from the funds that flow through the DHS, while ensuring that billions of dollars are available for border guards, immigration agents, counter-terrorism units and other voter-pleasing things. It is a clever scheme that is also doomed. It cannot pass the Senate, where the Republican majority is too slim. The party is even further from the super-majorities needed for Congress to overcome a presidential veto. As a result, Republicans face some ugly choices. They can either let current funding for the whole DHS expire; or, if that does not appeal, they can surrender, or pass a short-term bill to postpone the crisis a while longer.

Ahead of a February 27th deadline to renew DHS spending, Washington folk have turned to a favourite game: guessing who will be blamed if funds dry up. Some House Republicans aim their fire at party colleagues in the Senate, grumbling that they should re-write their chamber’s voting rules in order to ram the House-amended bill past Democrats. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a pugnacious right-winger, has an elaborate explanation as to why Democrats will be blamed. If Democrats decline to vote for a spending bill with riders added to destroy Mr Obama’s immigration policies, he says, they will be irresponsibly defunding homeland security in an “extreme” bid to protect the president’s “lawless amnesty”.

The DHS stand-off was complicated on February 16th, when a federal district judge in Texas agreed with a complaint filed by 26 states and temporarily blocked the most recent of Mr Obama’s immigration actions, finding that the president had exceeded his powers. The wrangling may yet end up in the Supreme Court.

Finger-pointing fascinates those inside the Beltway bubble. But the shutdown threat raises larger questions about divided government in the Obama era. Mr Boehner and his allies have kept House members content by adopting a staple of Tea Party rhetoric: presenting a policy dispute with Mr Obama as a battle to defend the constitution itself. Once made, that is a hard argument to back away from. If that sort of dogmatism is applied to future budget disputes, gridlock will only worsen.

Government shutdowns in modern times have often involved disputes about abortion, welfare and even nuclear-missile funding, with Democrats questioning Ronald Reagan’s strategy for avoiding a third world war. But all sides typically accepted that the constitution obliged them to negotiate and make divided government work. Today, too many Republicans hear the constitution telling them to dig in and seek Mr Obama’s surrender.

Fighting, not fixing

The Founding Fathers did worry about overweening presidents trampling the constitution. They might even have been alarmed at the scope of Mr Obama’s immigration actions. That is why they created independent courts as a check on the executive and—for when that failed—gave Congress powers of impeachment. Today’s Republicans fear even to use the I-word, remembering the backlash that followed the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. As a result, they seem tempted to use their budget powers as a sort of impeachment-lite.

More pragmatic Republicans, notably in the Senate, are appalled by renewed talk of shutdowns. A rare House moderate, Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, says a number of his Republican colleagues “are tired of being driven into a ditch by bad tactics”. He disagrees with Mr Obama’s executive actions on immigration, but says their legality “will be settled in the courts, not in the halls of Congress”. Meanwhile, with Islamic State fanatics on the march, Congress should do its job and fund the DHS. If after that Congress still dislikes Mr Obama’s actions, Mr Dent concludes, it should take up its own immigration legislation. He is right. Alas, many of his colleagues prefer to be seen fighting Mr Obama’s plans, not fixing them.