Oct 26, 2013 3 min read

For a moment this summer, before the insanity of the partial shutdown of the federal government took hold, there was a fever among some Republicans in Washington, D.C., to impeach President Obama.

For what crimes and misdemeanors exactly? None was ever proffered. But that didn’t stop some from having visions of Kenneth Starr dancing in their heads, along with the sugar plums.

State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, the Butler County Republican referred to by one of his colleagues in a Capitolwire story a few months back as “an angry man who is out of touch with reality,” seems to have picked up the same malady, except his target is state Attorney General Kathleen Kane.

Last week, Metcalfe announced he was looking for sponsors for a bill to impeach Kane for not defending the Pennsylvania law that limits marriage to one man and one woman. Because she does not believe the statute is constitutional – a perceptive observation, given that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act in June – Kane has said she would stand aside and let Gov. Tom Corbett and his administration defend it against a challenge that has been filed in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling.

But Metcalfe, who pulls off the rare feat of making Pennsylvania’s former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum seem mild and reasonable in comparison, maintains that Kane is “creating a constitutional crisis by refusing to perform her assigned role and usurping the role of the courts.”

In a memo he circulated, he solemnly intoned that “it is our duty to stop her from engaging in further misbehavior in office.”

We strongly suspect that Kane’s primary “misbehavior,” in Metcalfe’s eyes at least, would be her status as a woman and a Democrat. In addition, she does not wish to limit the rights of gays and lesbians in the commonwealth, and that, from all appearances, is one of Metcalfe’s primary obsessions. Kane was having none of Metcalfe’s nonsense, however. She fired back, saying that the lawmaker has “limited knowledge of the laws or perhaps poor understanding of time-tested, clearly enumerated legal principles. While he purports to know what actions I have taken, he is wrong.”

She added that Metcalfe’s “goals of media attention and political gamesmanship are accomplished through loud, arrogant and misguided claims … I have never been afraid of or backed down from bullies.”

Good for her.

In a recent issue of The Nation, columnist Gary Younge describes the rise of the European far right and compares them to our own tea party, pointing out that “their central function is not to challenge the course of events but to protest their inevitability. They articulate an impotent, shrill and resentful rage that seeks an audience rather than a cure.”

That’s also an apt description of Metcalfe’s latest foolishness.