Grow Up-and Impeach
Grow Up— and Impeach In the classic courtroom dramas from which most Americans learn their law, there inevitably comes a final scene in which the hero attorney gets the bad guy on the stand and...
...Disgraceful...
...He, more than anyone else, must be believed...
...Perjury in a federal court is a particularly serious crime, because it undermines American justice’s basis in truth and threatens to turn the law into something arbitrary and ineffective...
...Kohl and his peers on the world stage openly mock us for our stubborn insistence on impartial and rigorous law and order, parading their ignorance of republican principle—and calling it sophistication...
...Impeach him, explain it, and they will come...
...David Tell for the Editors...
...It is enough...
...In any case, partisan considerations and attendant worries should count as nothing in the awesome decision to impeach a president...
...There will never be such a cue...
...See him basking in supportive, implicitly anti-American applause at the United Nations...
...Our attention to the whole Lewinsky thing makes him want to “vomit,” says Helmut Kohl of Germany, where the tradition of mute obedience to leadership apparently still runs deep...
...In every essential respect, what we are going to know, we know already...
...Citizens of the United States elect representatives to Congress...
...Violations of those laws are prosecuted and adjudicated in federal courts...
...The president, President Clinton, welcomes the insult as a convenient prop for his self-absorbed political defense...
...They are amazed, in fact, that we would be the least bit upset over a president who twists the agencies of our government to conceal a crime of dishonesty...
...So Clinton’s “job approval” numbers remain quite high...
...Anybody who’s taken the time to dope it all out knows that full well...
...The villain is powerful and cunning, his alibi apparently airtight...
...his work is largely done...
...Clinton must be expelled from the Oval Office...
...Malefactor, do you recognize this stained blue dress from the Gap?—the scoundrel gratifies us emotionally by dissolving into blubber and confessing completely...
...Yes, we know, majority public opinion does not yet endorse resignation or impeachment for this most shameless and cynical of history’s presidents...
...But our mothers taught us better...
...It is the president’s executive branch that enforces federal law...
...of its national audience, claims should work in the president’s favor...
...Real life does not work this way, of course...
...In one recent poll, less than 30 percent say he shares their values...
...But Bill Clinton resolutely refuses to acknowledge that he knows he’s guilty...
...And we, as a people, will come to remember that elementary lesson only when more of our leaders, the men and women in positions of political responsibility, give it fresh voice—and apply it to the task before them...
...It is not so much that such a man must be punished for his misdeed...
...And our president, who would in any other circumstance be expected—and obliged—to rebuke such an assault on our national honor...
...Nor can the discourse of democratic politics, which sustains the law, be kept alive if the president is universally understood to be a liar...
...But they can be persuaded...
...It is rather that such a man cannot be president...
...Bill Clinton cannot be believed...
...Bill Clinton doesn’t think so...
...It should be enough...
...And so the rest of the country appears befuddled, passively awaiting the cue—from him, just like it happens on TV—that it’s okay to impeach him for violating his constitutional oath of office...
...He is guilty as sin...
...Nor can Congress do the necessary job simply by devoting itself to the silent, mechanical process of reviewing and redacting Starr’s boxloads of documents...
...And that corner of real life occupied by our current president is completely devoid of pleasing, gotcha catharsis...
...In the less developed political cultures of Europe and parts still farther east, they do not get the high philosophy and glory of American rules...
...Kenneth Starr cannot do this...
...These are fat and happy years—rich and secure, at least on the surface...
...But in the end, he, too, must obey the script’s rigid moral logic...
...And perjury in a federal court, committed by the president, is a catastrophe...
...American minds are not yet where they need to be on the question of William Jefferson Clinton...
...He actually dared smile about it...
...So under withering cross-examination about a surprise piece of evidence—Mr...
...If the law is bent for him, it cannot fairly or legitimately be applied to anyone...
...Even so, most Americans reject him both as a man and an exemplar...
...Some things are more important than winning...
...There will never be such a Perry Mason moment...
...Real life is duller and more difficult...
...The survey data make it clear that, while the country might not now actively favor ending Clinton’s presidency, neither would it miss him much if he were to go—or rebel against members of Congress who did their duty and sent him away...
...The presidency must be kept clean of perjury...
...There was no Perry Mason moment in Clinton’s videotaped grand-jury testimony, an unsurprising fact that the White House, playing to the naivet...
...Grow Up— and Impeach In the classic courtroom dramas from which most Americans learn their law, there inevitably comes a final scene in which the hero attorney gets the bad guy on the stand and nails him cold...
...There will probably not, for that matter, be any further devastating disclosure that finally seals Bill Clinton’s fate...
...Congress writes our laws...
...The adult truth of the matter runs like this...
Vol. 4 • October 1998 • No. 4
