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 of it,” Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania told a reporter. “You and I know there will be no impeachment.” 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. Reed cited the Election Day exit poll showing Americans opposed impeachment by roughly two to one. He said Republicans should vote for censuring the president “and then move on with the rest of their agenda for the country.” That was November 15. One month and four days later, the House of Representatives impeached Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice.
So what did change? In fact, not much. 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. A fourth was likely: a vote on the House floor to impeach Clinton. 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. The facts, of course, were overwhelming — for anyone without a partisan bias in favor of Clinton. Republicans, including moderates, didn’t have this bias. For them, not voting to impeach was always going to be difficult. Thus, while there wasn’t a built-in majority for impeachment, there was always a potential majority.
Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, and Tom DeLay turned it into an actual majority. Gingrich’s role was inadvertent. Ironically, the prospects for impeachment would have been worse if Gingrich had kept his job as House speaker. 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. Clinton needed an enemy to demonize, and, given Gingrich’s unpopularity with the public, he was an easy target. 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. 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. DeLay, the House GOP whip, wasn’t a household name either. As for Hyde, the Judiciary Committee chairman, he was actually popular. While two out of three Americans dislike Gingrich, two out of three like Hyde. The result: no Gingrich, no effective White House strategy.
Important as Hyde’s role as a happy face for the Republican party was, it was not his most significant contribution. After the election, Hyde was the one (and only) person who could have killed impeachment. If he’d listened to Republican governors or consultants, he would have. If he’d wanted to be lionized by the press as a statesman, he would have. But he didn’t. Rather, he conducted hearings on impeachment that became more serious and more civil as they wore on. Hyde, patient and affable, made the hearings both a substantive success and good TV. Hyde flinched only once, and that was for a good cause. He agreed to hold a committee vote on whether censure should be allowed as an alternative to impeachment. This produced two good results. It appeased Democrats, and it lost.
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. He didn’t pressure anyone. But DeLay gets credit for a signal achievement: He killed censure. Actually, he killed censure repeatedly. When it came up in September, he delivered a floor speech denouncing censure advocates. “Anyone who considers censure — and makes decisions based on the polls — believes the rule of man, not the rule of law,” he declared. After the election, sentiment for censure emerged again. DeLay held a conference call with dozens of GOP House members and secured their opposition to censure. Still, censure didn’t die, but came up again during the hearings. 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 wounded censure, but still didn’t kill it. And censure got a new lease on life when Hyde agreed to bring it before the Judiciary Committee. He didn’t inform DeLay, who feared Hyde might have resurrected censure. As it turned out, the committee voted along party lines to reject censure. 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. “Hyde realized a vote on the floor on censure could jeopardize all the work his committee had done,” a GOP official said. In response, Livingston, also at DeLay’s instigation, announced that he opposed a censure vote by the full House. Censure was dead.
This cleared the way for Republican moderates to fall in line behind impeachment. DeLay knew leaning on them wouldn’t work. His theory is that lobbying moderates never works, except to give them grounds to do what you don’t want them to do. So he keeps hands off. But he didn’t want to let them off the impeachment hook either. He didn’t want them to be tempted by censure. 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. He guessed right. When the House voted last Saturday, only four moderates defected, plus conservative Mark Souder of Indiana.
Why so few? The president’s legal defense made defection an unattractive option for Republicans. Stonewalling and legalisms had kept much of Clinton’s political support intact for months. But that defense “contained the seeds of its own destruction,” says GOP consultant Jeffrey Bell. The problem was it gave Republicans no fig leaf if they voted against impeachment. Clinton’s lawyerly and contemptuous response to 81 questions submitted by the Judiciary Committee crystallized the point and alienated wavering Republicans.
In the end, Republican unity on impeachment shouldn’t have been a surprise. And it wouldn’t have been if the results of the November 3 election had been interpreted correctly. Initially, though, Republicans accepted the Democratic explanation that they had lost because they were pursuing impeachment. Later, they realized they’d simply been out-hustled. 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. Even so, the exit polls showed 60 percent of Americans don’t like Clinton. As the momentum for impeachment grew, little public opposition appeared (except in Hollywood). And on impeachment day — the day that was never supposed to happen — there was scarcely a peep of protest outside the Capitol.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
