Gene Healy of Reason has an interesting article up about how we need more impeachment, not less. He doesn’t call for impeachment for President Obama, but rather goes after liberal critics who think that impeachment is a radical and extreme option that should never be brought up. Here’s their argument:

I’m not convinced that any of President Obama’s recent scandal eruptions constitute an “impeachable moment.” But surely something’s gone wrong with our constitutional culture when opinion leaders treat the very invocation of the “I-word” as akin to screaming obscenities in a church.

“The notion of impeachment is industrial-strength insane,” Michael Tomasky fumes in the Daily Beast. Over at the Atlantic,“communitarian” guru Amitai Etzioni moans “I see no way to protect the president and all of us from the second term curse.”

“First among” the serious issues that confront us, Etzioni insists, is “the threshold for impeachment.” It’s distressingly low, he argues in a piece entitled “Why it should be harder to impeach the president.”

“Harder”? We’ve impeached a total of two presidents in our 224-year constitutional history: Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton (Richard Nixon resigned before the full House had a chance to vote on articles of impeachment). Let’s be charitable and call it three. The question that should have occurred to Etzioni is, if we only manage to impeach a president once every 75 years or so, just how easy can it be?

Healy goes on to make a historical case for impeachment as a check against the executive that should be taken seriously, and not used as a political tool. Clinton’s perjury in the 1990s was hardly the type of “high crime” that should have warranted impeachment. Reason argues that the real impeachable offense for Obama is the invasion of Libya itself. The problem is, there wouldn’t be popular support for impeaching the President over that particular issue. Impeachment shouldn’t be a dirty word, but we need a concrete case.