At the moment, Republicans agree that Obama is failing to uphold his oath of office. But they don’t yet agree on how to fix it.

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When it comes to the subject of whether to impeach President Barack Obama, Republican sentiment is coalescing around three options: Yes, No and Maybe.

Sarah Palin is now the face of the Yes camp with a blistering op-ed that doesn’t mince words. “Enough is enough of the years of abuse from this president,” she writes at Breitbart.com. “His unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, ‘no mas.’”

After some well-delivered zingers, Palin’s point essentially boils down to this: By refusing to secure the border, Obama is breaking the law. And he’s doing it for his own enrichment.

The summer 2012 decision to waive deportation proceedings against illegal immigrant minors not only granted more than 1 million people de facto amnesty, it convinced hundreds of thousands of parents to send their children into the United States expecting similar treatment.

Now the border is bursting at the seams with wave-after-wave of unaccompanied children. But rather than reunite these kids with their home country, Obama has asked Congress for $3.7 billion to house, feed and medicate them. Worthy goals to be sure, but opponents can be forgiven for sensing other motives: Normalize, legalize and franchise. Importing new Democratic voters through lawless means is unconscionable, but not beyond belief. As Palin says, “President Obama’s rewarding of lawlessness, including his own, is the foundational problem here.” Thus, “It’s time to impeach.”

“I disagree.” House Speaker John Boehner undoubtedly spoke for a wide swath of Republicans in and outside Washington, D.C. when asked to comment on Palin’s argument. Instead, the Ohio Republican supports legislation that would allow the House of Representatives to file a lawsuit against the president for failing, as required by Article II of the Constitution, to “faithfully execute the laws.”

Boehner’s disagreement with Palin is no doubt influenced by experience. He was an up-and-coming House member when he saw Newt Gingrich’s speakership consumed by the impeachment – and subsequent acquittal – of Bill Clinton. The current House GOP leader wants to avoid a similar fate.

And yet, Boehner agrees with Palin’s central premise that Obama is acting lawlessly. In an op-ed he wrote for CNN a day before Palin’s broadside, Boehner criticized the president for “circumvent[ing] the American people and their elected representatives through executive action, changing and creating his own laws, and excusing himself from enforcing statutes he is sworn to uphold – at times even boasting about his willingness to do it, as if daring the American people to stop him.”

With words like those, it’s impossible to think that Boehner’s opposition to impeachment is set in stone. What’s more likely is that he prefers court-approved legal arguments about executive power to political arguments over the use and abuse of that power.  

That’s where the Maybe caucus comes in. It says that impeachment is warranted, but only if it is presented in the proper political context.  Legal arguments aren’t enough.

In his recent book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, Andrew McCarthy reminds us that impeachment is a political process to remove officeholders responsible for maladministration. The end of impeachment is to separate bad administrators from positions of power. The key ingredient is loss of trust. Impeachment is necessary when no amount of adverse legal rulings – even from the Supreme Court – will stop a president from pursuing a strategy of lawlessness. The only remedy is to throw the bum out.

But McCarthy isn’t calling for Boehner’s House immediately to introduce the seven Articles of Impeachment laid out in Faithless Execution. Before that can happen, politicians and the public they must persuade must come to terms about the necessity of impeachment – Barack Obama cannot be trusted to run the government.

Since taking office, President Obama has presided over the use of the IRS to target political opponents; knowingly arming drug cartels; leaving an American ambassador and his security detail open to massacre, and then misrepresenting the intelligence on national television; enriching friends like Solyndra with sweetheart energy deals; politicized hiring at the Department of Justice; granting backdoor amnesty that provoked even more illegal immigration, and the continued refusal to implement ObamaCare as written.

This list goes on.

At the moment, Republicans agree that Obama is failing to uphold his oath of office. But they don’t yet agree on how to fix it. If the experience of the last five plus years has taught anything, it’s that this president will not be deterred from his agenda to transform American life with whatever means necessary. In order for impeachment to gain traction, Republicans must convince the American people that this president is an unyielding threat to the rule of law, and therefore must be removed. Barring that, all the flashy op-eds and legislative lawsuits won’t make a difference.