What a Difference a Year Makes: A Post-Impeachment Symposium
In Paris this past December I visited with the president of the French senate. He asked me why President Clinton in such circumstances received such high poll ratings. I said, "I don't know." He...
...Who knows...
...They knew that a rabble in the House of Representatives might, someday, try to impeach a president solely for personal misconduct...
...We do love recounting all those smarmy details—and hoping for fresh ones—and they can blind us to truths that millions of other Americans already comprehend, if inchoately...
...We all now know the effectiveness of that threat...
...Which, if I am right, brings me to the long-term lesson...
...While I disagree with the severe limits regarding witnesses, the Senate made the right decision in proceeding to an up-or-down vote on The American Spectator • April 1999 the president's guilt, rather than allowing themselves the illusory middle-ground of censure or "finding of fact...
...I don't question Kenneth Starr's personal integrity or brilliance...
...LAMAR ALEXANDER has served as governor of Tennessee and secretary of education...
...which left one vexing problem facing these "impartial" senators: Based on the law and the evidence, the president was...
...It could have opened an impeachment inquiry earlier in the year, but instead it accepted the law's invitation to shirk its constitutional responsibility and waited for Starr—the first counsel ever to invoke 595(c) — to finish the job...
...The American Spectator • April 1999 111111 Just before President Clinton testified before the grand jury, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch warned him against lying, declaring that "if he goes before the grand jury and lies, then I think that would be a real call for his impeachment...
...Nonsense...
...Monica diverted Mr...
...Privately they find Bill Clinton's behavior reprehensible...
...These procedures have now been written into the rulebook of precedent and will be dusted off and used, as great and learned precedent, in future impeachment trials...
...DAVID HOROWITZ is the author of Radical Son, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, and a columnist for Salon...
...In one key respect he was less equal than his fellow citizens...
...Go after Clinton to get even for Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Bob Packwood...
...Clinton from his public duties and then diverted the public from his public crimes...
...It may take a while for the self-absorbed and self-referential political class (which, of course, includes most political historians) to grasp the larger meaning of the impeachment follies...
...The American people, in simultaneously judging Clinton a liar, corrupt, and fit to be president, are expressing contempt for Washington and the federal government...
...Yet, even pre-impeachment, the administration was determined to unilaterally enforce those economy-crunching standards...
...They believe politics can make people rich and virtuous...
...ROBERT D. NOVAK is a nationally syndicated columnist and co-host of CNN's "Evans, Novak, Hunt 6 Shields...
...They won't go away...
...The Juanita Broaddrick story already makes Clinton's defenders look awful...
...Finally, in a stunning coup de grace, they finis:led off the House case by drastically limiting the number of videotaped witnesses to a pitiful three, to be videotaped in the final stages of the "trial," when the witnesses knew they would be forever off the hook once the short, limited nuisance of the videotaped interview ended...
...Paul Weyrich might well wonder how far the moral compass of Americans has gone haywire in just a decade...
...However, this is where the weakness in the impeachment process lay, and is the real reason why most of the public were not behind it...
...Impeachment encompasses both political and legal judgments...
...Finding out about Mr...
...The impeachment of President Clinton has served a long-term useful purpose: It has reminded everyone, including future presidents, that the United States is a republic under the rule of law and everyone in it, including the holder of the highest office, is subject to the law and answerable to it by due process...
...Then they precluded the possibility of hearing from even a single live witness...
...I didn't support Clinton until The American Spectator, Ken Stan, and Republicans began fussing over whether, when, and with whom he had sex...
...Those Democrats who voted against impeachment or conviction begin to sweat...
...His most recent book is The Populist Persuasion: An American History (revised edition, 1998...
...What it tells us about the culture is that Americans are not Paul Weyrich/Dan Quayle/Jerry Falwell/Gary Bauer conservatives...
...I wanted him out...
...Which is the final lesson future generations should learn: 48 April 1999 • The American Spectator If you're ever going to try to oust a president through impeachment, first make sure you have impeachable offenses...
...As we know, the House impeached, but it did not send the Senate as compelling a case as it might have...
...Even then, unless Clinton killed a political opponent, respected "scholars" would analogize the murder to Andrew Jackson's dueling, and argue that it was "private" and did not "threaten our constitutional system...
...Our example in this challenge should be Henry Hyde, James Rogan, and the rest of the House impeachment managers...
...But the constitutional process was followed and he is still there...
...Perhaps for the first time in history, America faces the frightening prospect of a president who is truly unconstrained—either by the prospect of facing the voters again, or of being impeached...
...The most important policy question emerging from the Lewin-sky saga is how to investigate a president accused of illegal conduct...
...Call them "partisan" first, before they can pin the label on you, where it belongs...
...It is more important for Congress to determine whether the president has corn-mitted impeachable offenses or otherwise acted in a manner inconsistent with the presidency than for any individual to be criminally prosecuted and sentenced to a few years in prison...
...Yet, when the Monica Lewinsky story broke, it was widely assumed that Bill Clinton could not stay in office if the allegations were true...
...I think the pi lit senses that the special prosecutorial sy tem, which gives a Grand Inquisitor unlir ited funds to use every legal device to corn an administration official, whose ow resources may be limited or non-existen and so force him into plea-bargaining ceven to pleading guilty to imaginary crimes, is fundamentalll unfair and unjust...
...He and his crew of lawyers and sycophants were able to portray Ken Starr and his congressional allies as hectoring moralists unwilling to red ognize the difference between a lying adulterer and a criminal ruler...
...But first, Republicans should stop wallowing in self-congratulation for having waged a noble, yet unsuccessful, struggle...
...Moral: You better have the cards in your hand to win—table stakes gets expensive...
...The focus on the Monica problem demonstrated the vacuum that exists within the congressional wing of the Republican Party, and emphasizes the need for the party to begin soon to decide what it will offer the American people in the year 2000...
...While Reagan's success ironically raised Americans' faith in politics and the federal government, Clinton is driving down America's faith in politics and government...
...They were attracted by the juror's role of impartially deciding guilt or innocence without commenting on the case in advance...
...But Clinton is not a soccer coach or neighbor...
...Today's citizens of the Republic seem to forgive unspeakable conduct by their president...
...In a moment of collective epiphany came the terrifying realization that jurors are 42 April 1999 • The American Spectator actually expected to render a verdict based solely on facts and law...
...guilty...
...Republicans should not bristle at the word "compassion...
...Those who voted against Clinton have no such worries...
...GROVER NORQUIST is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...That produced a lot of sympathy for Mr...
...It will require great skill with the media, and enormous effort—neither of which have been much in abundance—to combat this tendency...
...Neither the courts nor the opinion polls can be counted on to stop the administration from these end-runs around the Senate...
...So most people understandably concluded it was essentially lying about sex...
...They're there the next morning...
...In setting rules effectively guaranteeing an acquittal, the Senate fundamentally altered/our system of checks and balances, radically strengthening the position of the executive branch, and necessarily weakening the legislative...
...Hatch has also threatened that if Clinton were to fire Independent Counsel Ken Starr, "all heck is going to get loose...
...That's because there was so little there...
...Indeed, during the confirmation hearings for Justice Thomas, the Forward, in an editorial called "Attaining Thomas," lamented "the way the process of attaining individuals has become almost de rigueur in the post-Watergate Congress...
...The Republicans will not be seen as the party of virtue, but in historian Sean Wilentz's words, as the party of "fools and fanatics...
...Clinton is the face of the politicized establishment: self-absorbed, self-important, self-centered, selfish...
...But they invested too much in it, and when it failed they were left holding the bag, which was empty, except for tax cuts...
...Clinton's behavior and, indeed, his ideology were secondary to his electability...
...The private story was so titillating that it diverted attention from his public crimes, which were the perjury and the obstruction of justice...
...Publicly—and especially when it comes to making government the arbiter of morals —they are very tolerant, even libertarian...
...For a large number of citizens, they probably never really began...
...Similarly, the Senate has registered its bipartisan opposition to implementation of the Kyoto global warming pact...
...I just feel the structure of the office he holds provides such incentives for mischief that it would take a saint to avoid the kinds of errors of judgment that he made in this case...
...A sea-change in public morality does seem to me a less than credible reason for his survival...
...He reminds all Americans that politicians should not be allowed near small children, sharp objects, or other people's wallets...
...That twice now has saved the Republic...
...It wasn't too difficult: The most clever satirist could not have invented Bob Barr, who looks and sounds like a man who would prosecute his own child for uttering a four-letter word...
...and 2. Suspicion of open-ended prosecutions by the state...
...They interpreted public opinion polls expressing enjoyment of a buoyant economy as a free pass for Clinton and forged what Jude Wanniski first described as a Faustian bargain —loyalty to their tainted leader in return for electoral success...
...Arlen Specter observed, it adopted procedures rendering the case for removal unprovable...
...Pardon me while I gloat...
...In 2000 voters will be more attracted to the Republican message that Washington should not be trusted with our lives, our money, or our guns...
...It did 114 destroy him, and it was then in turn explc ed by the Republicans in an attempt destroy President Clinton...
...Of course, being compassionate is not the same as being foolish, but some Republican ought to be able to convey the impression of being one without being the other...
...What this year of the failed Clinton impeachment trial tells us about American politics is that Democrats are better at it than Republicans...
...But in the early 50's, there was at least objective crisis in the world to sustain the phony crisis in Washington that McCarthy and the Republicans created...
...The House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice...
...It is a deficiency of our system that the party out of the White House does not develop a program until it chooses its candidate, which is usually only a few months before the election...
...Later, radicals and liberals despised Richard Nixon because he hounded Alger Hiss and slaughtered Vietnamese who stood in the way of achieving "peace with honor...
...But at least the members will no longer have the excuse that there is an independent counsel out there, doing our work...
...History's verdict on their performance will be harsh: The impeachment drive will be compared to the Salem witch trials as well as to the Army-McCarthy hearings...
...Perhaps it will be some intern who copied FBI files, a Chinese general who defects to Taiwan, an Indonesian businessman, a Buddhist monk, another Jane Doe...
...Once upon a time, conservatives reviled Franklin Roosevelt as a crypto-Commie because he recognized the Soviet Union, legitimized the power of the left-leaning CIO, and then embraced Joe Stalin as a wartime ally...
...I interpret the public reaction as distinguishing between his private behavior and his public behavior...
...The president must indeed be subject to the law—that has been usefully shown by the impeachment—but the law must not be stacked against him...
...It was only afterwards that the House began to act...
...It was pure folly for Republicans to carry his dim torch all the way through a Senate trial...
...Uh-oh...
...Clinton critics continue to maintain that such abuses of power in fact are rampant in this White House, but they could not {or at least did not) bring proof to the bar of justice...
...It has seemed to me important to have protected these prerogatives even when a weak, disreputable figure was in the presidency...
...What Bill Clinton did was inappropriate, but not impeachable...
...There you are, fixing breakfast, trying to get the kids off to school, and there is this rated moviemovie in your yard...
...MICHAEL KAZIN is currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center...
...Clinton has no hidden virtues...
...The people's business is legislation, not investigation...
...Clinton floats above his scandals partly because he is believed to be compassionate...
...Under these rules, it will be virtually impossible to even obtain a fair trial of future impeachments...
...You bet...
...It was bad enough that Ken Starr, America's self-appointed Top Sex Cop, elevated lying about consensual extramarital sex into an impeachable offense...
...So you go about your business and do your best to ignore it, hoping the outrageous event and all those reporting on it will somehow, someday disappear, but knowing that in the meantime you can't do anything about it...
...His latest book is What I Think: Essays on Economics, Politics, and Life, recently published by the AEI Press...
...A law that requires a prosecutor to decide what may constitute an impeachable offense is a very bad idea, if not formally unconstitutional...
...The principle of equality before the law is absolutely central to good democratic government—in some ways it is more important than one-man-one-vote — and anything which demonstrates that it works in practice and not just in theory is salutary...
...It was passed by a Democi tic Congress anxious to destroy Presid, Nixon at almost any cost...
...Plus, it gave them a chance to toss out huge quantities of appropriately senatorial rhetoric, stressing their weighty constitutional responsibility...
...The folly of scandal politics...
...Fearing loss of their majority nearly as much as they dreaded loss of their seats, Republican senators sought an "exit strategy" at the cost of an effective case to the American people for Clinton's removal...
...As things are today, a Republican contender would bear the burden of running when there are no conspicuous national problems...
...The problem is Republican political strategy: It's lame...
...Only 5o senators voted to convict and remove Clinton...
...During the Clinton presidency, for example, the main witnesses regarding the president's possible misconduct—David Hale, Jim McDougal, Susan McDougal, Monica Lewinsky, and Betty Currie —never testified in public hearings held during Congress's Whitewater and Lewinsky inquiries...
...In the long run, their message to public officials will be this: Respect the office...
...Complaints about Clinton that I've heard from Democratic politicians seldom addressed his moral or ethical transgressions but were directed at occasional deviations from liberal orthodoxy (particularly support of welfare reform) and the wholesale loss of Democratic office-holders during his presidency...
...Jones's lawsuit would open the way to politically motivated and harassing litigation...
...Stan Evans used to say that he didn't support Nixon until Watergate...
...The primary responsibility for investigating the president has migrated from Congress to a criminal prosecutor, the independent counsel...
...Just as the Simpson trial taught America that one can get away with murder with a sufficient supply of cash and chutzpah, the legacy of the Clinton impeachment will be a message to future presidents that they can get away with practically anything so long as they are not burdened with a measurable supply of shame, and are willing, at most, to weather the inconvenience of a House impeachment that will surely be gutted by a toothless Senate "trial...
...Even before his first election as governor in 1978, he had been tapped as a bright new Democratic light but burdened with "too much baggage"— a reputation for uncontrolled womanizing...
...The year also taught a political lesson: that a president determined to do "whatever it takes" can defeat a prosecutor and a Congress controlled by the opposite party...
...The truth is, this battle was not about truth and justice...
...After all, the man was elected to accomplish the contemporary equivalent of making the trains run on time...
...The culture is sound...
...TIM W. FERGUSON is the West Coast bureau chief of Forbes...
...Citizens do not readily cede power and authority to those they despise...
...Tax cuts have rarely been a winning political issue, as was learned in 1948, 1954, and 1982, and as Mr...
...After their colossal failure in 1995 to shut down the EPA and cut Medicare, the Republicans threw all their energies into hying to undermine their opposition through investigations...
...These 13 fought to keep alive the core American value of equality under the law, without regard to their own futures...
...The framers anticipated that such efforts by a president would be stopped by the ambitions of the other branches to protect their own prerogatives...
...I came out of the new left rather than the Democratic Party, and prided myself on being able to view the follies of the two major parties dispassionately, but the Republican Party's conduct since November 1994 has turned me into a Democrat and, most recently, a raving Clintonite...
...I also feel the Supreme Court itself blundered in permitting a civil litigant to proceed against a sitting president...
...First, the "culture wars" are over...
...In the end, helping to shrink the role of an office that had outstripped democratic proportions might be the best thing Bill Clinton ever did for his country...
...Clinton was the first of a now sizable breed—genial pols with resolutely centrist agendas who now govern most nations in the post-industrial West...
...If we assume that a sitting president cannot or should not be criminally indicted, a criminal prosecution of a president could occur only after he left office...
...He's a governor writ large, a public servant rather than an elected monarch...
...Because nobody—not Ken Starr, not House managers, not even a majority of Senate Republicans—could ever connect the dots...
...Although President Clinton has turned out to be a disappointment for Reagan Democrats, I have stuck to the opposition so many of us voiced, back during the Reagan years, to the concept of an independent prosecutor...
...Suddenly, like a magic portal in a B science-fiction movie, an exit appeared...
...Impeachment failed for one reason...
...Someday we are going to have a president whose constitutional prerogatives we will want to protect...
...Instead of nullifying the law by refusing to enforce it, this particular "jury" simply nullified itself As Sen...
...He reminded me that Napoleon's foreign minister Talleyrand once had said, "What becomes excessive becomes irrelevant...
...It is ours, not yours...
...As a result, the fundamental question is not whether a president accused of illegalities should be criminally prosecuted, but whether he should continue to hold office...
...As the trial commenced, however, a light went off in the heads of senators such as Fritz Hollings, Max Cleland, and Robert Byrd who, days before, were eagerly referring to themselves as jurors in correspondence and interviews...
...If Congress does not reauthorize the independent counsel law, there is no guarantee it will reclaim its impeachment power...
...The Clinton defense was successful because it was built on the following conservative/libertarian principles: i. Defense of "privacy" (yes, I know, I know, but that's what the American people bought...
...The biggest was his decision as an inferior officer to target the president himself, a matter that I have felt should be left totally to Congress...
...It eventually conducted an inquiry, but there were no witnesses called...
...First, the senators refused the House managers a chance to rebut the president's case, despite the fact such an opportunity would be accorded the moving party in any American courtrwm...
...attorney, serves on the House Judiciary Committee...
...Boy, that must reassure Ken Starr...
...Some day people are going to wake up, the way they finally did in the 1950's, and say this is going too far and has got to stop, and when this stupor is shaken off a lot of people are going to wish they'd spoken up at the time...
...There is one cheerful option...
...I would not interpret the public's attitude as signifying a decline in private morals...
...Most Americans think he's done that—and no longer care whether the president is a symbol of strength and rectitude, the kind who can face down enemies abroad with a stern word and a massive 46 April 19 9 9 • The American Spectator arsenal at the ready...
...What's to stop it now...
...Enough already...
...That doesn't work...
...Who cares what he does...
...It is time for Republicans to leave Monica and taxes behind and concentrate on showing what national problems would be solved by putting a Republican in the White House...
...For the remaining two years of this administration, Americans, especially conservatives and the business community, will have to be especially vigilant to guard against Clinton administration lawlessness...
...Are there lessons to be learned...
...He has shown how you can win approval with a billion dollars here and a billion dollars there and a lot of smiles and sympathy...
...BRETT M. KAVANAUGH, a Washington attorney, formerly served as an associate counsel for Independent Counsel Kenneth W Starr...
...Republican politicians, part of the same political class, read the polls and backed away from a real trial in the Senate...
...Henry Hyde and his merry band of managers tried to twist the Constitution for their own partisan purposes —and failed...
...Indeed, if there is an allegation of presidential wrongdoing, a congressional inquiry coupled with the threat of perjury prosecutions afterwards also should take precedence over the criminal investigation of any presidential associates (except, perhaps, in violent crime cases) — even if the congressional inquiry would require immunity for those associates...
...The court said that it wasn't persuaded that Mrs...
...From the beginning, it was purely about naked politics...
...As a strategy, it recalled the Republicans of 1950 who, after having won Congress in '46 and lost it in '48, attempted to tar the Democrats as the party of Communism...
...Because Congress is the entity constitutionally assigned to determine whether the president should remain in office, it follows that a congressional inquiry should take precedence over a criminal investigation of the president...
...The impeachment fiasco is a splendid argument for term limits, but that is one issue where the political class defies public opinion in the interests of personal survival...
...GARY L. BAUER, former president of the Family Research Council and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families, is a Republican presidential contender...
...They figured things early and never wavered...
...Some conservatives argue that America's reaction to the past year shows a moral failing on the part of the people...
...His books include Ethics, Politics and the Independent Counsel (1989...
...The impeachment trial itself stemmed from the exhaustion of Republican policies...
...We said then that what was being done to Judge Thomas reminded us "of the fever that seized the legislature in the early 1950's and came to be called McCarthyism...
...The Senate sitting in an impeachment trial is unlike other juries in one important aspect— it gets to make and reinterpret its own rules as it goes along...
...You don't want to talk about it...
...But the left also has its quotient of prigs—and they continue to drag around an image of "political correctness" that hampers the work of more tolerant liberals...
...This time, the moral crisis the Republicans invoked was really the political crisis of the party...
...Why couldn't all those geniuses in Washington figure it out...
...The trial procedures adopted by the Senate in the impeachment trial of William Jefferson Clinton promise to be one of the greatest constitutional aftershocks of the recently completed impeachment process...
...Does the president's acquittal, and the widespread public sentiment in favor of acquittal, mean thatAmericans no longer want our nation to stand for reliable standards of right and wrong...
...My concern is with those who wield government power...
...I am certain they want such standards as much as ever...
...In February, Hatch warned Clinton not to renominate Bill Lann Lee, whom the Judiciary Committee had previously refused to confirm, as chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division...
...Clinton's lack of respect for our presidency...
...There are more than 200 people around the globe, any one of whom might wake up and turn state's evidence and we are off to the races on another Clinton scandal...
...BOB BARR, a House manager in the Clinton impeachment trial and a former U.S...
...President Clinton's success is tied to that class...
...You don't want to hear one more thing about it...
...44 April 19 9 9 • The American Spectator Since the Great Depression, the Republican Party has always faced the problem of being branded the party of business and the wealthy...
...Section 595(c) requires a counsel to advise the House on impeachment, and Ken Starr dutifully carried out this task, sending up his report in September...
...Such protection requires political will, however, and it seems entirely spent...
...Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan were each in his way able to give a larger identity, but the Gingrich-DeLay Republicans—by attempting to yoke the party to the religious right and K Street with a single harness—alienated even many wealthy voters...
...There will be no pleasant surprises for Clinton's defenders...only unpleasant surprises...
...The law creating a special prosecutor, charged witf investigating and indicting members of tt administration, including the president, w an iniquitous piece of legislation which gc directly against the principle of equa before the law...
...Between what Bill Clinton did...
...But the movie screen and the movie are still there that evening...
...You do your best to throw a sheet over the screen—or several sheets...
...With a Republican Congress to check his worst political impulses he cannot steal our guns or paychecks...
...If the lies (and obstruction) don't concern matters integral to the operation of the government, they'll tolerate them...
...BILL PRESS is co-host of CNN's "Crossfire...
...Here then is a question: If some future president is criminally investigated, whether by a court-appointed or Justice-appointed counsel, or even the Justice Department itself, will that president follow the Clinton prece43 dent...
...A single assignation deprived Gary Hart of a presidential nomination in 1988 and past drinking bouts and possible philandering in bygone days prevented John Tower from becoming secretary of defense in i989...
...The correct explanation may be less cultural than political, specifically the development of a bipartisan professional political class to whom electoral victory and governmental power mean everything...
...Two are worth mentioning, and neither will gladden steelier partisans of either right or left...
...Democrats understand that, in political war, paranoid projections prevail and the aggressor usually wins...
...I am certain we can, if we concentrate on what we believe, and what most needs to happen to make those beliefs prevail...
...If the local minister, high school coach, or businessman did what Clinton did, he would be fired and driven out of town...
...substance, not scandal...
...I see no cause to be discouraged on either count...
...Even before impeachment, a non-binding Senate vote of 99-0 objecting to such a blatantly unlawful maneuver failed to dissuade the administration from its path...
...The last year undermines their worldview...
...Clinton did so anyway...
...The lesson learned is that the independent counsel law can encourage impeachment even as it works against conviction and removal...
...But it has become more than you can deal with...
...As for the Republican Party, the big question is whether we can put together a persuasive governing vision for z000...
...A prosecutor's concern is, or at least should be, only the latter...
...Isn't it amazing how quickly we've been able to move from impeachment to other issues...
...This transfer of investigative responsibility not only is constitutionally dubious, it is illogical...
...This is a good thing...
...Thus the impeachment provision in our Constitution, at least insofar as it concerns executive branch officers, has emerged from this trial a pale shadow of its former, intended self...
...Senate...
...But I think there is a warning that a moral majority does not translate into a political majority...
...President Clinton was not equal before the law...
...John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made young people want to go into politics and believe that politicians were idealists who wanted to better the nation...
...Now what...
...As a defender of the Constitution, I have every right...
...The post-impeachment Clinton administration is now free to indulge its penchant, manifested even before impeachment, for pressing the outer bounds of the law, if not flagrantly violating it...
...Clinton reminds us that politics is ugly, sordid, and about the self-interest of politicians...
...Events of the past year showed just how bad the independent counsel law is...
...Ditto "sexual McCarthyism...
...Most senators clearly did not want the kind of trial that offered a serious chance of conviction...
...But the abiding hatred of Bill Clinton is a far more personal kind of loathing, which the uninitiated can neither share nor really understand...
...That may change, but the Republicans should not any more count on a recession to save them than they should have counted on Monica to save them...
...There are some issues—anti-missile defense, a more discreet foreign policy, improvement of education, reduction of crime, antidiscrimination policy without quotas—but they need to be spelled out...
...Or will this president feel the modicum of shame that Clinton did not...
...JOHN B. JUDIS is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...Bill Clinton still lives in the White House because of this gap between the true believers and everyone else...
...The second truth is that a president with no Cold War or serious hot war to wage doesn't matter the way his predecessors did...
...In the days preceding the impeachment trial, senators were quick to publicly refer to themselves as "impartial jurors...
...TERRY EASTLAND is publisher of The American Spectator...
...Despite the Senate's acquittal of Bill Clinton, the House's first-ever impeachment vote against an elected American president is the sort of event that will have an impact over many years, as well as affect the national debate in the period ahead...
...And what the Constitution says...
...P.S...
...That is, will he deny, lie, delay, stonewall, leak, litigate, accuse, and so on and so forth...
...Monolithic Democratic support for Clinton against impeachment cast the process in a partisan light that built public resentment to Republican prosecution...
...In other words, the whole affair becomes so excessive it becomes irrelevant to your everyday life—which is not the same as saying you approve of it or that you do not have your opinion about it...
...Dole could remind everyone about in 1996...
...That Clinton reached the top while carrying that baggage is testament not only to his personal campaigning skills but the craving for power of Democratic politicians after losing five of the last six presidential elections...
...America now confronts the "F--k You" Presidency...
...A healthy Republican Party will proudly celebrate these men, and stand with them in the battles that lie ahead...
...We have to live with that...
...The administration would be justified in believing that, at this point, Clinton would not be removed from office for anything short of a murder captured on videotape...
...For most Americans, there's a proportionality test to lying...
...Much better...
...Now we must all hope Mr...
...Sooner or later the American people will render a harsh judgment on Mr...
...I believe the debate of the past few months is but one episode, however frustrating, in a long struggle over who we are and what we believe...
...The House of Representatives deserves enormous credit for its act of courage in December 1998, in the face of negative polls and widespread misunderstanding...
...For too long, Washington's been nothing but a big game of "gotcha...
...The most important immediate lesson, therefore, is that Con gress should at the earliest possible date abolish the office of special prosecutor and repeal the law creating it...
...The new exit strategy became jury nullification with an added twist...
...He said he thought he did...
...Clir ton, as did the decision to make his sexual weakness the area c-I investigation, as opposed to the far more serious charge of obtair' ing electoral finance from Communist China in return for "bent ing" American foreign policy in Peking's interests...
...I also think it likely that the phenomenon of the Clinton presidency, when fully digested, will make their desire for such standards much greater than before...
...But by the time Clinton's mishandling of the Lewinsky scandal raised the specter of impeachment, Democratic politicians had come to regard him as their salvation...
...PAUL JOHNSON is most recently the author of A History of the American People (HarperCollins...
...The Democrats are the party of politics and of government...
...49...
...What to do now...
...I fully appreciate the irony of the Democrats—attackers of Judge Bork and Justice Thomas—pleading for an end to the politics of personal destruction...
...most have long resented anyone who persists in shouting, "Which side are you on?' While militant minorities battled over homosexual and abor tion rights, growing numbers of people managed to live with the apparent contradictions—lunching with a gay co-worker but blanching at a Mapplethorpe print, or lecturing one's pregnant daughter about the sanctity of life before driving her down to Planned Parenthood...
...He, like Blair and Jospin and Schroeder, campaigned on a promise to advance growth without sacrificing too much equity...
...The Republicans had to proceed with the impeachment process, even though they knew, as they should have known, that it would fail...
...Clinton's conduct was, for most Americans, like waking up one morning and discovering a drive-in movie screen had been erected overnight in your front yard, and on this screen was playing an XXX-rated movie starring the president of the United States...
...Your first reaction is shock...
...Perhaps Americans hold a low opinion of Bill Clinton but still oppose removing him The American Spectator • Ap r 1 1999 47 because they have read Earth in the Balance and realize our vice president is a dangerous, Luddite loon...
...The House publicly released the report almost as soon as it arrived, as though that would influence public opinion...
...He is just the president...
...God bless America...
...And stop accusing the American people of being immoral because they never went along...
...In contrast, I view the press as having a different responsibility under the Constitution, one that the Wall Street Journal and The American Spectator and a few others have carried out courageously, putting all of the above into sharp relief...
...To illustrate, what is to prevent the administration from rewriting and readopting the ABM treaty with the Soviet Union as an executive agreement with Russia and several former Soviet states, without the Senate's approval...
...DANIEL E. TROY, a Washington lawyer, is an associate scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...As both the Lewinsky and Whitewater matters demonstrated yet again, the ironic legacy of Watergate — a scandal in which aggressive congressional inquiries helped uncover presidential crimes—is that we no longer count on Congress to lead an investigation into possible presidential wrongdoing...
...HERBERT STEIN is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Your next, outrage...
...Every morning they will run to read the newspaper to see if a new (or old) Clinton scandal emerges to make their pro-Clinton vote look worse...
...The impeachment process only aggravated the general impression of Republicans as being dour and mean...
...Far-greater appreciation for the wisdom of the American people...
...I don't think that the public's endorsement of Clinton as president reflects endorsement or acceptance of his private sexual behavior...
...Clinton keeps his nose clean for the rest of his term and that his successors tread more warily...
...SETH LIPSKY is editor of the Forward...
...You know exactly what you think...
...Go after Newt to get even for Jim Wright...
...The impeachment ordeal has taught us this: • Deep gratitude for the wisdom of the Founding Framers...
...It is even more likely—and more unfortunate—that future Houses will look at possible impeachments and not even bother with them in the first place, knowing a Senate "trial" will never be a trial again...
...So what can you do...
...Such are the wages of having failed to (with apologies to the Secret Service) "kill the king...
...Because they were blinded by their hatred of Bill Clinton...
...This quote, I believe, captures the short-term lesson of the Clinton scandal...
...That's why they built a governor into the impeachment process: a two-thirds vote for conviction in the U.S...
Vol. 32 • April 1999 • No. 4
