Readers of WaPo today may have run across this wild-sounding report by Reid Wilson from the Show-Me State:
A Missouri state House committee will hold hearings Wednesday into three proposed articles of impeachment against Gov. Jay Nixon (D), whom some Republicans say has committed offenses worthy of being removed from office.
One legislator has lodged a complaint over Nixon’s executive order last year that directed state tax officials to accept joint tax returns from same-sex couples who were legally married in other states. Nixon said in November, when he issued the order, that the state should accept the same sorts of tax returns as the Internal Revenue Service, which accepts joint returns from same-sex couples.
Another legislator said Nixon hadn’t moved fast enough to call special elections in three state House districts and a Senate district left vacant by resignations. State law directs the governor to call elections “without delay”; state Rep. Mike Moon’s (R) legislation accuses Nixon of breaking that law.
And a third legislator says Nixon deserves the boot for insufficiently punishing officials at the state Department of Public Safety for releasing a database of Missourians with permits to carry concealed weapons. In 2013, the state Highway Patrol said it had given the list of 163,000 concealed carry permit holders to a Social Security Administration agent in relation to an investigation into fraudulent disability claims.
The list of permit-holders was to be compared to a list of Social Security recipients collecting benefits for mental illness claims. A top Highway Patrol official said at the time the state considered the federal request a part of a criminal investigation. Nixon didn’t immediately fire the officials responsible, as House Republicans had demanded.
OMG, Nixon is disrespecting guns by failing to fire people with the unimaginable view that they should perhaps not be in the hands of people with mental illness! Is the Second Amendment on its last legs in Mizzou?
Actually, our good friend from Missouri Blue Girl puts the impeachment talk in perspective today at Show Me Progress:
Jay Nixon was elected by over 1.5 million Missourians in 2008 and re-elected by almost 1.5 million in 2012. He is perhaps the most popular, most successful elected official in the history of the state. By contrast, the state representatives making all the noise – the crazy relations who escaped the attic – garnered the votes of less than 25,000 Missourians total.
This is about ideology and making a name for themselves back home in the district, but in reality it is nothing more than a publicity stunt to get the name of a few wingnut state legislators in the weekly paper back home.
It’s true that the GOP holds super-majorities in both the state senate and the general assembly, but those super-majorities aren’t, for the most part, insane. The crazies are loud, but they’re few in number, by comparison, so the bills that are being shrieked about now have very little chance of getting to the floor of either chamber for a vote before the session ends in just a few days.
I guess the bottom line is that for some “constitutional conservatives” any Democratic executive is presumed impeachable for the horrible high crime and misdemeanor of being a Democrat. Elections be damned: Democrats are violating the eternal rules of governance handed down by Almighty God and the Founders, according to which gay people are abominations unto the Lord and maximum gun ownership is essential to the preservation of freedom–you know, if impeachment doesn’t succeed.
