Furious over Barack Obama's recent executive orders, House Speaker John Boehner announced today that he would sue the president for doing something about health care, and institute impeachment proceedings against him for trying to fix immigration and climate change. Obama, Boehner suggests, has failed to recognize that doing something in relation to a do-nothing Congress is tantamount to treason.
Boehner seems to have taken his cue from Shakespeare in this regard, particularly Lear's happy conclusion that "Nothing will come of nothing."
Obama, like some treacherous Jacobean villain, has had the nerve to make decisions while the Congress was out on a well-earned vacation for six weeks from doing nothing for over six years. The same Congress has refused to guarantee any vacation time at all for working Americans, on the compelling argument ("Nothing will come of nothing") that this would constitute a form of welfare cheating only permitted to senators and representatives.
The country elected a largely Republican Senate and House on the assumption that government would continue doing nothing at least for the next two years, and, hopefully, beyond. It is indeed criminal of Obama to have upset this expectation, and, worse, to actually be doing something every day of the week, not only on these offensive domestic predicaments, but also on such foreign snags as ISIS, Iran's nuclear policy, relations with China, and the Israel-Palestine conflict, to name only a few.
To watch him lurch from issue to issue, traveling all over the globe, from early morn to late night (how dare they never let us see him sleeping), constitutes an open affront to an indignant John Boehner and his angry followers. One can almost hear Boehner howling, like Lear over the body of Cordelia, "Never, never, never, never." For to do something in the current political atmosphere is to be guilty of criminal trespass.