Moulitsas: Will the GOP impeach?

Speaking at a Labor Day rally in Milwaukee, President Obama gave the strongest indication yet that he’s close to taking decisive action on immigration.

“Hope is what gives us courage; hope is what gave soldiers courage to storm a beach,” he said. “Hope is what gives young people the strength to march for women’s rights and workers’ rights and civil rights and voting rights and gay rights and immigration rights.” According to Time magazine’s Zeke Miller, it was the first time Obama added immigration rights in his riff on civil rights. 

{mosads}The addition drove conservatives on Twitter crazy, foreshadowing the expected frenzy from conservatives when Obama looks to executive orders to do what a broken Congress has refused to do: make improvements to our broken immigration system. 

The Senate already passed a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill, but Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) refuses to move any legislation forward, despite having the votes to pass the Senate bill. He fears his party’s nativist right more than he fears his party’s demographic challenges. And those challenges are stark. The American Latino population has grown from 9.1 million in the 1970s to 53 million in 2012. And while that is currently 17 percent of the U.S. population, that number will be 31 percent by 2060, according to Pew Research.

In the United States, more whites died than were born in 2012.

The irony is that immigration isn’t driving the bulk of that growth. In the early 2000s, about 40 percent of Latinos were foreign-born. Today, that number is 35.5 percent. In other words, U.S. births are driving growth. And with 800,000 U.S.-born Latinos entering adulthood every single year, it’s mind-boggling that conservatives are obsessing over the 10 million-12 million undocumented immigrants that would be legalized under a reform bill, only half of whom might ultimately seek citizenship (based on past amnesties). 

In short, the GOP’s problem isn’t immigrant Latinos, it’s American Latinos. 

Conservatives have convinced themselves that these brown people are the end of Western civilization itself. “The demographic winter of white America is at hand,” wrote Pat Buchanan in a column last year, leading him to ask, “Where is America going?” The very thought of Obama acting on immigration via executive order already has conservatives screaming impeachment.

“[I]f the president has decided that he simply is not going to enforce any immigration law,” said Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), “I think Congress has to sit down and have a serious look at the rest of this Constitution and that includes that ‘I’ word that we don’t want to say.” Fox News’s Jedediah Bila claimed that “this president is forcing the impeachment issue,” and another Fox News talking head, Andrew Napolitano, said that, if Obama delayed deportations, the solution “is right there in the Constitution.” In case that was too subtle, he clarified: “Impeach him.”

Republican Party leaders have spent the last several months trying to stamp out such talk, aware that it makes them look crazy and unhinged. There’s a reason that the GOP’s favorability ratings are a woeful 29 percent, with 62 percent viewing them unfavorably, according to the latest CBS poll. In the run-up to this November’s elections, the last thing Republicans want to do is remind people that they’ve surrendered to their crazy base. 

Too bad. Because when Obama acts on immigration, nothing will be able to contain their hysteria. 

Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.