NO DEAL
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
NO DEAL by Charles Krauthammer AT FIRST IT WAS JUST PANICKED DEMOCRATS looking for some way to get off the impeachment hook without appearing to exonerate the president. But then the wise men—that...
...The Clintons are not just penniless...
...Three years later that censure (of Andrew Jackson by the Senate over a dispute about the Bank of the United States) was not just revoked by the Senate but expunged from the record...
...Removal is the job of Congress...
...Which is why the Congress should adhere not to what Democrats incessantly call "the wisdom of the American people"—a euphemism for the polls—but the wisdom of the Founders...
...when the Republicans wouldn't buy, the ante was upped...
...III There is yet a third problem with censure in all its varieties...
...And would end up as the single most remembered moment of the Clinton presidency, condign punishment for a president who so lusted for a legacy—any legacy—that he cared not a whit what it might consist of...
...First, it is flatly unconstitutional...
...That is a bill of attainder, forbidden by Article I, sections 9 and 10, of the Constitution...
...Ours would no doubt be solemn, with homilies hurled instead of fruit and with grave voice-overs by network anchors intoning about the grandeur of the moment...
...If the president acts criminally, the Congress may remove him...
...In which case, the legislature should cease and desist and let the government go on...
...Ford seeks to improve on censure, a mere piece of paper, with the high theater of a public congressional rebuke...
...Clinton, of course, would, as a way to save his own skin...
...Congress has no right to order the president to go anywhere, let alone appear before it in the well of the House...
...So the search for an even better middle way continued, culminating in the ultimate, the Platonic ideal of sage moderation...
...No president should do that...
...In any future presidential scandal or violation of the public trust, Congress will be called upon to calibrate some punishment, to judge the president through censure or rebuke or whatever combination of humiliation and/or fine it deems fitting...
...And that's when you knew for sure it was a terrible idea...
...This was no mere Leon Panetta or Lloyd Cutler or Howard Baker...
...They are millions of dollars in debt...
...Not good...
...II Yet this too will not do...
...And second, there is the practical issue...
...Reviving this particular president while debilitating his successors: This is exactly the opposite of what a wise resolution to this scandal should achieve...
...The point of censure is to mark the official end of the Clinton scandal and signal a return to normal business—which is precisely why Clinton so desires it...
...This was former president Gerald Ford...
...No private conversation, no public event takes place today without the inevitable, often inadvertent, Clintonian double entendre...
...It is, dare I say, aesthetic...
...In this particular scandal, it is argued, the level of offense simply does not merit the remedy of removal...
...The proposals for censure or censure plus or censure squared are an attempt to satisfy what is called the proportionality issue...
...The office cannot and ought not be so demeaned and diminished...
...Censure plus therefore means, in reality, censure plus a couple of Clinton phone calls to find a fatcat to pay the bill...
...If we ever have one, the Ford proposal would be a splendid way to reprimand a prime minister short of canning him...
...An end to the saga and the return to business is, of course, an excellent idea...
...It came with the imprimatur of a wise man eminent, wholly irreproachable, and of such advanced age (85) as to have no possible personal interest in the matter...
...For Clinton to come, he would have to voluntarily submit to the summons of Congress...
...Censure does not add to Clinton's discomfort...
...No censure, no fine, no president sitting in the well like a naughty boy waiting for a spanking...
...Ours, after all, is not a parliamentary democracy...
...At a recent performance of Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance at Washington's Shakespeare Theater, a line about a politician's "lacking that fine faith in the nobility and purity of life" received a huge roar of knowing laughter...
...It brings to mind two great moments in ostentatious (self-) flagellation: Henry II having himself flogged for the murder of Thomas à Becket and Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV standing in the snow for three days to beg absolution from Pope Gregory VII...
...which is why the censure of a president has not been tried since 1834...
...There are two problems with this proposal...
...But then the wise men—that motley crew of eminent fixers and formers (Former Secretaries of this, Former Counsel to that)—weighed in...
...The problem is neither constitutional nor aesthetic but practical...
...it was therefore talked up incessantly by Democrats and others looking for the easy way out...
...Ford weighed in for what can only be dubbed "censure squared": that the president be ordered to the well of the House before a joint session of Congress where he would be personally and publicly rebuked...
...The job of the legislature is not to correct or remonstrate or improve the chief executive...
...It would be yet another example, indeed the paradigmatic example, of a career spent putting personal welfare first—ahead of the office and of the country...
...It is this very theatricality which is disturbing...
...But the Founders would have nothing to do with calibrated critiques or proportional remonstrances, with slaps on the wrist or slaps in the lace...
...The Ford version of censure, moreover, presents an additional problem...
...In a system of separated powers, the legislature should vote up or down on removing the executive...
...Ford is right that this would have a dramatic effect...
...Nothing more, nothing less...
...Censure ends it...
...There is no way they can pay a fine...
...If Ford is followed, it will consist of this one humiliating video clip...
...But given the sordidness of the whole affair, this remedy has more the feel of an improvised exorcism...
...We have a president...
...Look: Clinton today stands already humiliated and ridiculed...
...It all began with joe Lieberman's speech on the floor of the Senate on September 4, the first major Democratic denunciation of the president...
...But it is cheap in yet another way...
...Condign it might be, but constitutional it is not...
...Its job is to remove him—or stick to legislating...
...unspun, it was his most fervent hope for a soft landing...
...George Stephanopoulos floated "censure plus": The congressional parking ticket would be accompanied by a fine...
...Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...it was the briar patch the president passionately pleaded he not be thrown into...
...With the single exception of impeachment...
...When faced with a scandal, one's objective should be to deal with the president in office without damaging the office itself...
...The first idea was censure, a resolution of Congress criticizing the president and putting its official stamp on the national verdict that he done wrong...
...Rebuke is the job of those who chose him: the people...
...On the contrary, it will save him...
...The practical effect of censuring Clinton will be to establish a precedent...
...The Congress cannot levy a fine on anyone...
...After that, no Democrat dared duck or defend...
...But we don't have a prime minister...
...Presumably this would give weight and substance to the gossamer of mere censure...
...The effect would be to gravely alter the balance of power between the branches...
...It will surely weaken the presidency, yet, ironically, it will not weaken this president...
...However, they certainly have enough rich friends who could pay it for them...
...That may be right...
...It lends itself perfectly to Clintonian cynicism...
...These are remembered not as exercises in true repentance, but as supremely manipulative acts of political theater by rulers desperate to regain legitimacy...
...Under a system that has succeeded for two centuries in preventing tyrannical rule by the brilliant and unequaled device of separating power, the legislature has no role in judging the chief executive...
...True, it puts yet one more stain on a ruined historical legacy, but for the here and now it revives Clinton by giving him two years in office with the affair now officially "behind him...
...But it needs to be done the right way...
...But since none wanted to impeach, there had to be a middle way...
...It would be televised...
...On the one hand, it is the kind of thing one expects in a banana republic, or perhaps in a banana republic as imagined by Woody Allen, with the dictator hauled before the baying assembly for a tomato throw...
...Censure is an exercise in calibration...
...There is no provision for anything else...
Vol. 4 • October 1998 • No. 6
