THE DIFFERENCE A MONTH MADE
BARNES, FRED
WHAT A DIFFERENCE A MONTH MAKES by Fred Barnes What changed? A month ago, Republican governors gathered in New Orleans and sneered at the bid to impeach President Clinton. "We're all kind of tired...
...Anyone who considers censure—and makes decisions based on the polls—believes the rule of man, not the rule of law," he declared...
...Hyde, patient and affable, made the hearings both a substantive success and good TV...
...When the hearings adjourned, DeLay arranged for Hyde to send a letter to then-speaker-designate Livingston insisting that censure not be brought to a vote on the House floor...
...Faced with voting up or down on impeaching Clinton, DeLay figured, they'd have to go with the evidence, the GOP base, and their Republican colleagues...
...DeLay, the House GOP whip, wasn't a household name either...
...DeLay knew leaning on them wouldn't work...
...Initially, though, Republicans accepted the Democratic explanation that they had lost because they were pursuing impeachment...
...This produced two good results...
...Reed cited the Election Day exit poll showing Americans opposed impeachment by roughly two to one...
...Without him—he let a substitute, Ray LaHood of Illinois, preside during the nationally televised impeachment deliberations—there was no one to single out as the focus of evil...
...And censure got a new lease on life when Hyde agreed to bring it before the Judiciary Committee...
...Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...This assessment was echoed by the mainstream media, GOP strategists, and even Ralph Reed, the political consultant and former executive director of the Christian Coalition...
...It appeased Democrats, and it lost...
...That wounded censure, but still didn't kill it...
...All this meant the case against Clinton couldn't be dismissed or ignored...
...House members would have to examine the evidence of Clinton's crimes, then weigh it against the president's defense, and finally announce a decision on impeachment...
...This cleared the way for Republican moderates to fall in line behind impeachment...
...In the end, Republican unity on impeachment shouldn't have been a surprise...
...Why so few...
...Later, they realized they'd simply been out-hustled...
...He guessed right...
...But he didn't want to let [ = them off the impeachment hook either...
...The president's legal defense made defection an unattractive option for Republicans...
...If he'd wanted to be lionized by the press as a statesman, he would have...
...After the election, sentiment for censure emerged again...
...He said Republicans should vote for censuring the president "and then move on with the rest of their agenda for the country...
...He didn't pressure anyone...
...Actually, he killed censure repeatedly...
...Censure was dead...
...If he'd listened to Republican governors or consultants, he would have...
...Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, and Tom DeLay turned it into an actual majority...
...Ironically, the prospects for impeachment would have been worse if Gingrich had kept his job as House speaker...
...We're all kind of tired of it," Gov...
...Clinton's lawyerly and contemptuous response to 81 questions submitted by the Judiciary Committee crystallized the point and alienated wavering Republicans...
...You and I know there will be no impeachment...
...When the House voted last Saturday, only four moderates defected, plus conservative Mark Souder of Indiana...
...DeLay held a conference call with dozens of GOP House members and secured their opposition to censure...
...Hyde realized a vote on the floor on censure could jeopardize all the work his committee had done," a GOP official said...
...Even so, the exit polls showed 60 percent of Americans don't like Clinton...
...Thus, while there wasn't a built-in majority for impeachment, there was always a potential majority...
...Three things unfolded exactly as expected: the evidence uncovered by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, the president's legalistic defense and stonewalling, and impeachment hearings by the House Judiciary Committee...
...DeLay got a Republican foe of impeachment, Chris Shays of Connecticut, to join him in opposition to allowing a vote on censure on the House floor...
...That was November 15...
...When it came up in September, he delivered a floor speech denouncing censure advocates...
...His theory is that lobbying moderates never works, except to give them grounds to do what you don't _ I want them to do...
...Still, censure didn't die, but came up again during the hearings...
...Eight million fewer GOP voters went to the polls in 1998 than in the previous mid-term election in 1994, and one million more Democrats showed up...
...The result: no Gingrich, no effective White House strategy...
...So he keeps hands off...
...As for Hyde, the Judiciary Committee chairman, he was actually popular...
...Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania told a reporter...
...But DeLay gets credit for a signal achievement: He killed censure...
...Gingrich's role was inadvertent...
...For them, not voting to impeach was always going to be difficult...
...However, it infuriated DeLay, whose pivotal role in impeaching the president consisted not, as might be expected from his job as whip, in pressuring Republicans...
...In response, Livingston, also at DeLay's instigation, announced that he opposed a censure vote by the full House...
...A fourth was likely: a vote on the House floor to impeach Clinton...
...After the election, Hyde was the one (and only) person who could have killed impeachment...
...And on impeachment day—the day that was never supposed to happen—there was scarcely a peep of protest outside the Capitol...
...In fact, not much...
...He agreed to hold a committee vote on whether censure should be allowed as an alternative to impeachment...
...He didn't inform DeLay, who feared Hyde might have resurrected censure...
...So what did change...
...Republicans, including moderates, didn't have this bias...
...Instead, the poor Republican showing in the November 3 election prompted Gingrich to step down, and that cost the White House a central element in its campaign to defend the president...
...One month and four days later, the House of Representatives impeached Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice...
...Hyde flinched only once, and that was for a good cause...
...ftJL He didn't want them to be tempted by censure...
...Stonewalling and legalisms had kept much of Clinton's political support intact for months...
...The facts, of course, were overwhelming—for anyone without a partisan bias in favor of Clinton...
...The problem was it gave Republicans no fig leaf if they voted against impeachment...
...While two out of three Americans dislike Gingrich, two out of three like Hyde...
...Rather, he conducted hearings on impeachment that became more serious and more civil as they wore on...
...Clinton needed an enemy to demonize, and, given Gingrich's unpopularity with the public, he was an easy target...
...As it turned out, the committee voted along party lines to reject censure...
...As the momentum for impeachment grew, little public opposition appeared (except in Hollywood...
...Bob Livingston, the new speaker-designate, was unknown nationally, and he mostly stayed out of public sight anyway—until he suddenly announced his resignation on impeachment day...
...Important as Hyde's role as a happy face for the Republican party was, it was not his most significant contribution...
...But that defense "contained the seeds of its own destruction," says GOP consultant Jeffrey Bell...
...But he didn't...
...And it wouldn't have been if the results of the November 3 election had been interpreted correctly...
Vol. 4 • December 1998 • No. 15
