By @BGinKC

Oh Dear Lord…the crazy relations have escaped the attic again. Normally, we would ignore them and quietly corral them back up and subdue them, but this time that’s not possible. This time they have gotten the attention of the neighbors and are terrorizing the countryside, running amok and shrieking about impeachment, and since they have drawn the attention of the neighbors, they must be acknowledged, as bad as I hate the thought of giving them more of the attention they crave.

A Missouri state House committee will hold hearings Wednesday into three proposed articles of impeachment against Gov. Jay Nixon (D), whom some Republicans say has committed offenses worthy of being removed from office.

One legislator has lodged a complaint over Nixon’s executive order last year that directed state tax officials to accept joint tax returns from same-sex couples who were legally married in other states. Nixon said in November, when he issued the order, that the state should accept the same sorts of tax returns as the Internal Revenue Service, which accepts joint returns from same-sex couples.

Another legislator said Nixon hadn’t moved fast enough to call special elections in three state House districts and a Senate district left vacant by resignations. State law directs the governor to call elections “without delay”; state Rep. Mike Moon’s (R) legislation accuses Nixon of breaking that law.

And a third legislator says Nixon deserves the boot for insufficiently punishing officials at the state Department of Public Safety for releasing a database of Missourians with permits to carry concealed weapons. In 2013, the state Highway Patrol said it had given the list of 163,000 concealed carry permit holders to a Social Security Administration agent in relation to an investigation into fraudulent disability claims.

The list of permit-holders was to be compared to a list of Social Security recipients collecting benefits for mental illness claims. A top Highway Patrol official said at the time the state considered the federal request a part of a criminal investigation. Nixon didn’t immediately fire the officials responsible, as House Republicans had demanded.

Call me old fashioned, or totalitarian, or late for lunch if you want to…but I kinda want the highway patrol and the county sheriff to know if someone is getting a disability check because they’re a paranoid schizophrenic and they’re also stockpiling weapons. Where does that person’s rights end? Where my body, or the body of my loved one, begins, that’s where. And the bullet doesn’t care, so I have to.

Let’s just cut to the chase…Jay Nixon was elected by over 1.5 million Missourians in 2008 and re-elected by almost 1.5 million in 2012. He is perhaps the most popular, most successful elected official in the history of the state. By contrast, the state representatives making all the noise – the crazy relations who escaped the attic – garnered the votes of less than 25,000 Missourians total.

This is about ideology and making a name for themselves back home in the district, but in reality it is nothing more than a publicity stunt to get the name of a few wingnut state legislators in the weekly paper back home.

It’s true that the GOP holds super-majorities in both the state senate and the general assembly, but those super-majorities aren’t, for the most part, insane. The crazies are loud, but they’re few in number, by comparison, so the bills that are being shrieked about now have very little chance of getting to the floor of either chamber for a vote before the session ends in just a few days…and even if, by some miracle or Jedi mind trick it did make it to the floor and pass, it would have to be approved by five of seven judges that were appointed by the state senate to authorize the conviction and remove the Governor from office.

In other words…it ain’t happenin’ – so in the words made infamous by state senator John Lamping; Moon, Brattin and Marshall should “find something else to do.”