Coburn: Obama 'Perilously Close' to Impeachment

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) said President Barack Obama was getting “perilously close” to being impeached at a Wednesday public appearance. 

“I think those are serious things, but we’re in serious times,” Coburn said in response to a question about impeachment at a town hall in Oklahoma, according to The Hill. “I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to high crimes and misdemeanors, but I think you’re getting perilously close.”

He said he was “documenting” all of the “lawlessness” alleged against Obama but did not offer any specifics. 

“I quite frankly think he’s in a difficult position he’s put himself in, and if it continues, I think we’re going to have another constitutional crisis in our country in terms of the presidency,” Coburn said.

The Senator later indicated that he favored a constitutional convention after reading Mark Levin’s book The Liberty Amendments, which will debut on the September 1 New York Times bestseller list at No. 1 in all three non-fiction categories.

As the Tulsa World reports, Coburn said he used to have a “great fear of constitutional conventions,” but now he has a “great fear now of not having one.”

Coburn implied that reading Levin’s Liberty Amendments, which notes that a “national constitutional convention can also be called by two-thirds of the state legislatures,” made him favor a convention. 

That admission reportedly “drew the loudest applause and reaction of the hour-long town hall meeting,” in which participants were angry at Coburn for refusing to join Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) in defunding Obamacare.

Coburn also told the town hall attendees that Obama “is a personal friend of mine,” and “he became my friend in the Senate, but that does not mean that I agree in any way with what he’s doing or how he’s doing it.”

Obama and Coburn famously co-sponsored the so-called “Google for Government” bill in 2006 that directed the Office of Management and Budget to create a searchable database for federal grants. Obama frequently cited Coburn as someone across the aisle with whom he worked and got along during the 2008 presidential campaign.