A Republican congressman wants to impeach Harry Reid, and he might’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling laws preventing Congress from impeaching senators.

Speaking last week to the Mifflin County Tea Party, Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA) seethed with anger about budget negotiations between the House and the Senate. His preferred solution to the impasse: impeach the Democratic Senate Majority Leader:

MARINO: I’ve made a suggestion that we should at least start talking about impeachment. I had my office staff do it. But we cannot find anything that permits the House to bring impeachment proceedings against Harry Reid. There’s nothing in the legislation we can find at this point to force him to vote or come up with a budget or anything like that. His membership in the Senate can call for a vote of “no confidence,” but we can’t even get a Republican senator to do that.

Watch it:

The Constitution permits senators to be expelled by a 2/3s vote of the Senate, but this is likely the sole remedy against a member of Congress their fellow lawmakers wish to remove. In 1796, Sen. William Blount joined a conspiracy to assist Great Britain in seizing Spanish territory in Louisiana and Florida, and was eventually impeached for his role in this conspiracy. Although the Senate expelled him, a majority of Blount’s former colleagues voted that they lacked jurisdiction to hear his impeachment. This precedent is often cited as establishing that members of Congress are not subject to impeachment, only expulsion.

This isn’t the first time Marino has floated impeachment as the cudgel for his preferred policies. During his initial congressional campaign in 2010, Marino said he would be willing to use “impeachment if necessary” against President Obama in order to increase border security.

Earlier this year, Republican National Committee Chair urged Republican lawmakers in states “that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red” — i.e. blue states with Republican legislatures and governors — to enact a plan rigging the Electoral College so that it would be almost impossible for a Democrat to win the White House. Under these plans, a large chunk of blue state electoral votes would be allocated to the Republican candidate even if the Democratic presidential candidate won the state as a whole. Although some state lawmakers in key blue states such as Wisconsin or Michigan endorsed versions of this plan, the election rigging plans were widely derided as exactly what they are — cheating — and soon, even top Republicans like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) or Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell wanted nothing to do with election rigging. The plans to rig the Electoral College appeared dead.

Except, that is, for Pennsylvania.

Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) was one of the earliest supporters of rigging the Electoral College, backing a plan to do so as early as 2011. Republican state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi was one of the leading supporters of election-rigging the and late this week, he — along with a dozen other co-sponsors — introduced a new plan to rig the Electoral College votes in his blue state of Pennsylvania. Under this legislation, a large chunk of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes would be awarded to the Republican candidate even though Pennsylvania is a solid blue state that has supported the Democratic candidate for president in every election since 1992.

Of course, while the Republican election-rigging plan calls for blue states to give away electoral votes to Republicans, red states like Texas or South Carolina will continue to award 100 percent of their electors to the Republican:

The 13 co-sponsors on Pileggi’s bill amount to exactly half of the 26 votes he needs to pass the bill through the state senate. According to state Rep. Mike Sturla (D-PA), now that Pileggi has introduced his election-rigging plan, Republicans could conceivably ram it through both houses of the state legislature and have it on Corbett’s desk in just four days.

GOP plans to rig the Electoral College to all but ensure that future presidents will be Republicans have been widely panned even by top GOP lawmakers such as Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan. Yet Pennsylvania Republicans still plan to move forward with an election-rigging plan that will ensure that a large chunk of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes go to the Republican candidate even though the state voted for the Democratic candidate in every election since 1992.

A spokesperson for Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi tells the Philadelphia Inquirer that hearings will likely begin on Pileggi’s election-rigging plan this spring. According to state Rep. Mike Sturla (D-PA), once Pennsylvania Republicans start the legislative process moving on their election-rigging plan, they can ram it through both houses of the state legislature and have it on GOP Gov. Tom Corbett’s desk in as little as four days.

Under Pileggi’s election-rigging plan, Pennsylvania will allocate most of its electoral votes proportionally — so if the Republican candidate wins 40 percent of the popular vote they will also receive 40 percent of these electors. Meanwhile, red states such as Texas or South Carolina will continue to award 100 percent of their electoral votes to the Republican. Earlier this year, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus encouraged Republican lawmakers in “states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red” to pass election-rigging plans, thus ensuring that red votes remain in Republican hands while many blue votes are also shifted to Republicans:

Shortly after the Democratic presidential candidate won the White House last November, Pennsylvania state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R) announced a plan to keep that from happening again in the future. Under Pileggi’s plan, the blue state of Pennsylvania would award electoral votes proportionally according to the popular vote, so that a percentage of it electors will go to the Republican candidate even if a majority of Pennsylvania’s voters prefer the Democrat. Meanwhile, red states would continue to award all of their electors to the Republican.

In response to an inquiry from ThinkProgress, state Sen. Mike Folmer’s (R) office explained that he supports this plan to rig the next presidential race because he believes it to be more consistent with the Founding Fathers’ vision. Seriously:

Senator Folmer believes such changes would be consistent with how electoral votes were originally awarded under our constitutional republic.

When the Electoral College was established by the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the individual states were empowered to determine how their electors would be chosen. The Founding Fathers rejected the idea of a national popular vote because they feared the rights and interests of the minority could be trampled by the majority. This is why the term “democracy” does not appear in either the Declaration of Independence or the United States Constitution.

From the first Presidential election of 1788 – 1789 through the election of 1800, the states’ electoral votes were awarded proportionally. After the bitter election of 1800, states began to move to a winner take all system – even though the citizens of that era considered such a change to be blatantly political. By 1836, all states had moved to a winner take all system.

Folmer is correct that Pileggi’s plan is more like the anti-democratic methods used to pick our first presidents, although he is wrong about many of the details of how early elections were run. In the first presidential election in 1788-89, just six states used some form of a popular vote to select the members of the Electoral College. Three states delegated this power entirely to their legislatures, although only about 30 percent of South Carolina’s lawmakers even bothered to show up to choose the first president. New Jersey’s governor unilaterally selected the electors in his state.

Moreover, this pattern of cutting the people out of the presidential election was common in early American elections. Six states held a popular election in 1792; eight held one in 1796; and just five held a popular vote in 1800. And the “popular” elections from this era cannot even vaguely be described as democratic. Just over 13,000 people voted in the 1792 election that reelected President George Washington — out of a nation of 3.9 million people. Needless to say, the 700,000 persons held in bondage at this point in American history did not cast a ballot.

So Folmer is right that Pileggi’s effort to cut the American people out of the opportunity to choose their own president is more like the system that elected our first presidents than our current system. The real question is why he thinks moving back to the anti-democratic days of the past is a good thing.

Sen. Folmer’s full statement is copied below the fold:
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Last month, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus called up “states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red” to rig future presidential elections by changing the way electoral votes are allocated. Under Priebus’ proposal, blue states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would stop awarding electoral votes to the winner of the state as a whole, and instead would award them one-by-one to the winner of each congressional district. Meanwhile, red states would continue to award 100 percent of their electors to the Republican. This plan appears to have lost steam, however, as several top Republicans in key states announced they will not support it.

Even as Republicans in key states such as Michigan, Ohio, Florida and Virginia came out against this election-rigging plan, however, Pennsylvania Republicans have been eerily quite. We now know why. According to the New Castle News a local paper in western Pennsylvania, Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R) will introduce legislation this month that will effectively give away a large chuck of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to the Republican presidential candidate, regardless of who wins the state as a whole.

How This Election-Rigging Plan Works

Unlike the plan Priebus backs, the New Republican Plan would not tie electoral votes to congressional districts. Instead, it would award the overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes proportionally according to the popular vote, with two additional electoral votes going to the winner of the state as a whole. If the New Republican Plan had been in effect in 2012, Mitt Romney would have received 8 of Pennsylvania’ 20 electoral votes, despite losing the state by a substantial margin.

The problem with the New Republican Plan is that it would only be enacted in blue states such as Pennsylvania — the Democratic candidate for presidential won Pennsylvania in every single election for the past two decades — while red states would continue to award all of their electoral votes to the Republican. Thus, the plan gives away Democratic votes to the Republican for free, while letting the Republican candidate keep all the votes they earn legitimately in other states:

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