Operation American Spring: Militias promise to oust Obama, Boehner on Friday

A retired United States Army colonel expects as many as 30 million like-minded individuals will descend on Washington, DC this week and demand that President Barack Obama and other members of his administration be booted from office.

Those are just some of the demands that Col. Harry Riley, founder of “Operation American Spring,” said he’ll ask the Obama administration to adhere to when militia members and patriots of all sorts arrive in the nation’s capital on Friday and begin demonstrating against a government the group considers to be in violation of the principles established by the founders of the country.

“We are calling for the removal of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi and Eric Holder as a start toward constitutional restoration,” Riley told the Before Its News website during an interview earlier this year.

“They have all abandoned the US Constitution,” he said, and “are unworthy to be retained in a position that calls for servant status.”

Riley told Before Its News in January that he expects his Operation American Spring movement will provoke anywhere from 10 million to 30 million Americans to mobilize this week and arrive in DC, where they will participate in a “massive, gigantic effort as a last stand before America moves into a more devastating condition.”

“For more than five years, ‘we the people’ have been writing, calling, faxing Congress, the media, screaming in town halls, marching, rallying, demonstrating, petitioning, all to no avail,” he said. “Every branch of government looks at ‘we the people’ whom they have taken an oath to serve, as ‘pests,’ interfering with their political agenda, cramping their self-serving, greedy agendas. We have no faith in the ballot box any longer, as many believe this sacred secret box has been compromised.”

To bring about that change, Riley says he hopes his group succeeds at shutting down the federal government. Whether or not all 29,999,999 of his compatriots will follow through, however, remains yet to be seen — a similar protest against Pres. Obama’s administration arranged last year by a fleet of truck drivers fell well short of making the dent that that group hoped to make.

“Last October,‘10,000’ truckers were reportedly on their way to literally clog the Beltway and shut down traffic in protest of Washington politics,” Abby Ohlhiser wrote for The Wire on Thursday this week. “In reality, about 30 truckers showed up, and they caused no delays worth mentioning.”

5/16/14 in DC Be there to Protect your Constitution and your Country!: @COLHarryRiley#USAhttps://t.co/93qwL0GzCg … pic.twitter.com/JUf7hFiJON

— Gail (@GailOnassh) April 27, 2014

Should Riley succeed in wrangling up 30 million Americans, Ohlhiser added, then he’ll have garnered the support of around one-tenth of the US population.

And though that goal — or the substantially smaller 10 million figure — is unlikely to be met, some individuals are already claiming on the official Operation American Spring forums to have arrived in the DC area ahead of Friday’s planned demonstration: on Thursday morning, one member of the message board wrote that his truck had already finished the 2,750 mile haul to the DC region in around 50.5 hours and had set up a base at a compound 27 miles outside of the city in rural Virginia.

“Camp is up and we have been meeting the other state camps. Good solid folks all the way around,” he wrote in another post.

According to other posts on the page, fellow Operation American Spring participants planned to meet at Arlington National Cemetery a stone’s throw from the District of Columbia on Friday morning, then march to the capital and stay there for days. Others on the forum have been attempting to arrange travel accommodations from as far away as Tucson, Arizona, Des Moines, Iowa and southeast Texas, and have been debating on the website where to camp in the DC area or whether or not to bring firearms along for the ride.

On a separate page linked from the forums, Col. Reid wrote that “One million or more of the assembled 10 million must be prepared to stay in DC as long as it takes to see Obama, Biden, Reid, McConnell, Boehner, Pelosi and Attorney General Holder removed from office.”

“We must appeal to ten million and more American patriots to come and stay in Washington, DC to stop the White House and Congress from total destruction of the United States. It’s now or never. God help us,” he wrote.