LET'S NOT MOVE ON
RABKIN, JEREMY
LET'S NOT MOVE ON JEREMY RABKIN ONE THING WE HAVE LEARNED is that Clinton will trample anything—a solemn oath, a clear law, his constitutional duty, anything—in pursuit of his own advantage. A...
...It was, incredibly, left to the independent counsel—essentially a bureaucrat—to decide how to frame the basic issues in the impeachment...
...All this being so, we can be sure that the acquittal vote will not put the Clinton scandals behind us...
...And a third thing we have learned is that, in Clinton's view, he vindicates himself by discrediting his accusers...
...A second thing we have learned is that the Democrats in Congress, down to the very last representative and senator, will participate in Clinton's obstructions, rather than let Clinton be called to account...
...The White House will certainly portray this as a judgment on Ken Starr's "excesses...
...When the House Judiciary Committee drafted impeachment charges against President Nixon in 1974, it did not focus exclusively on crimes but listed a whole series of abuses, concerning the IRS, the FBI, and other agencies...
...Most of us who favored Clinton's removal came to see the specific charges arising out of the Lewinsky scandal as a "synecdoche" (as William Safire put it), a mere illustration of a wider pattern of lawlessness which was the real grounds for removal...
...As it was, of course, the focus on the Lewinsky case allowed Clinton's defenders to portray Starr and the House Republicans as Puritans obsessed with sexual peccadilloes...
...Jeremy Rabkin teaches constitutional law at Cornell University...
...Instead, the articles asserted that the president "knew or had reason to know" that his subordinates engaged in abusive acts, that Nixon "did direct, authorize or permit" various abuses, and so on...
...We cannot be sure that changing the focus to other scandals would have roused a public already sick of scandal and recrimination...
...Either Clinton really did disgrace his office to an extent that merited impeachment, or the Republicans behaved with heedless partisan zeal in trying to impeach him...
...But why did impeachment charges come to focus on the very narrow question of whether Clinton's testimony before the grand jury was technically perjurious or his cover-up efforts amounted in a technical sense to "obstruction...
...Nixon's accusers could not prove that he had personal knowledge of these abuses, but they did not think they had to prove it...
...One immediate awkwardness is that Democrats will soon be demanding that the independent counsel statute be allowed to lapse...
...But it is unfortunate that Republicans, not having launched the Lewinsky charges from their own committees, were skittish about pressing home the charges, almost until the House voted impeachment last December, and then resumed an ambivalent posture during the trial...
...If Republicans shrug off the whole episode as no more than a good try that happened to fail—a mere rerun of the Dole campaign—they will make it easier for Clinton to dismiss them as reckless, partisan, and petty-minded...
...It may be years before public opinion finally comes firmly to rest on one conclusion or the other...
...But the issue should not have been reduced to the technical terms of a criminal indictment...
...And where public opinion does finally come down will affect how the public views the office of the presidency, the standards of public life— and the Republican party—for the next generation...
...But they must find ways to remind the public that Clinton's conduct makes it impossible to trust him and therefore impossible for Republicans to cooperate with him on any serious legislative venture...
...But opinion won't remain indefinitely suspended...
...But there is not much sense in defending the institution now, since it did, in its own way, contribute to the public's rejection of the impeachment effort...
...I am not sure what Republicans can do now to reaffirm the worthiness of the impeachment effort...
...Then the Republicans, not Clinton and his Democratic apologists, will go down as the villains of this tale...
...In other words, the impeachment effort marched straight into the Left's stronghold— that fortress of opinion built up in defense of sexual freedom...
...I believe that Starr decided to focus all his efforts on the Lewinsky case because that was where he thought he could catch the president personally...
...Americans may now say they are sick of the scandal coverage and the impeachment debate, but they won't soon forget something as momentous as a presidential impeachment...
...More serious scandals—the wheedling of campaign contributions from Communist officials in China, the accumulation of FBI files in the White House, the perpetration of blackmail and spying operations on opponents—were left unresolved or entirely unexplored by congressional committees, which were content to let the independent counsel take the heat for scandal-mongering...
Vol. 4 • February 1999 • No. 22
