Will Republicans pay a price for impeaching the president in the House and carrying through with a trial in the Senate? Who knows? It’s certainly true that the Republican party, in its belief that Bill Clinton should be removed from office, is at odds with the majority of the American people. It’s true as well that the Republican party’s approval rating has dropped in recent months and trails that of the Democrats.
But it’s also the case that in a recent Zogby poll Republicans ran even with the Democrats in a congressional ballot test. And the likely Republican standard bearer in 2000, George W. Bush, consistently leads Vice President Al Gore in presidential trial heats. Surely if the GOP were in as severe a meltdown as the New York Times insists, the prospective Republican presidential candidate — the party’s most visible representative in the most important forthcoming election — would be paying a price in the polls.
Current polls, of course, probably tell us nothing about what is likely to happen 21 months from now. Once the threat of removal disappears, after all, Clinton’s numbers may start to slide, as Americans who have rallied to him for don’t-rock-the-boat reasons, or from hostility to his accusers, start to drift away. Even if impeachment is an issue in November 2000, it’s hard to predict who will be better off, the pro-impeachment party or the pro-Clinton party.
But for now, Republicans are pro-impeachment and anti-Clinton. And what this means is that for now the leader of the Republican party is not the speaker of the House, nor the majority leader of the Senate, nor any of the prospective presidential candidates. It’s Henry Hyde. And Republicans should be proud to stand with Henry Hyde against Bill Clinton.
The Democrats have stood with Clinton. That has meant minimizing the importance of perjury; appealing to public opinion to trump the law and Constitution; allying themselves with a politician of considerable gifts but of low character. To stand with Henry Hyde, by contrast, is to be allied with an honorable politician and an impressive man.
Two of Hyde’s comments — off-the-cuff remarks made during the senators’ question period on Friday and Saturday, January 22-23 — stand out. That first day, Hyde was arguing against the Senate’s temptation to treat the articles of impeachment cavalierly: “I know, oh do I know,” he said, “what an annoyance we are in the bosom of this great body. But we’re a constitutional annoyance, and I remind you of that fact.” In our time, when so many look to convenience rather than to the Constitution, when so many talk of exit strategies rather than of duties, it is refreshing, and important, for a political leader to defend the primacy of constitutional obligations — even, or especially, when they are “annoying.”
Hyde’s other striking comment came the next day: “There are issues of transcendent importance that you have to be willing to lose your office over. I would think of several that I am willing to lose my office over. Abortion is one. National defense is another. Strengthening, not emasculating the concept of equal justice under law . . .”
Leaving aside the rarity of a politician’s being willing to lose office over anything, the irony is that Hyde here lays out, en passant, the core of a Republican agenda for 2000: defending the country, defending the Constitution, and defending the unborn. After all, the real problem afflicting the Republican party today is not impeachment. It’s everything but impeachment. It’s Republicans’ failure to come to grips with the true issues of the day, their inability to figure out how to oppose a superficially alluring Clintonism. Hyde, in his offhand articulation of what really matters, does more to help in that task than a whole bevy of other Republican leaders have so far.
All honor, then, to Henry Hyde — the man who, in the concrete pressure of a bitter partisan struggle, has had the courage and capacity to defend the principles of constitutional government and to demonstrate the elements of honorable conduct, standing as an example to future generations.
William Kristol
