The modern American political party is a frequently disappointing beast. And the Republican party, sure enough, has all too often in recent years disappointed us with graceless or timid leadership. This magazine has never hesitated to point out these GOP weaknesses. They still exist, and we do not hesitate to acknowledge that they have occasionally revealed themselves even during the epic controversy that has lately consumed the country’s public life.
But neither do we hesitate to say that the Republican party, at least in the House of Representatives, has now fulfilled the ultimate responsibility imposed on it by that controversy — to an extent, and with a courage, that puts paid to our every past criticism.
There were moments of uncommon eloquence and drama in the House debate last Friday and Saturday: Judiciary Committee chairman Henry Hyde’s opening statement; the agonized floor speeches of GOP moderates like Tom Campbell of California and Nancy Johnson of Connecticut; the rigorous legal arguments of Charles Canady of Florida and Christopher Cox of California; and the stunning resignation announcement of speaker-designate Bob Livingston. But eloquence and drama are as nothing in the grand scheme of things; the votes themselves are what counted.
By those votes, a narrow House Republican majority, with support from only a few men of conscience across the aisle, did something almost never seen in American politics of the television age. The House Republicans risked their political futures to pursue an apparently unpopular objective — and did so because they thought it necessary to preserve the integrity of our constitutional order. History will smile on these Republicans; they may never live a nobler moment. For his undeniable crimes, and for his defilement of the presidency in the concealment of those crimes, William Jefferson Clinton has been justly impeached.
And what of the Democratic party in all this? By the start of Friday’s debate, the Democrats’ substantive defense of the president had long since been reduced to a hopeless hash. Early last week, John Conyers’s Judiciary Committee minority released a 93-page dissenting report on impeachment that tacitly concedes the president is guilty of perjury. Indeed, the Conyers report argues that the president could not have committed an obstruction of justice — when he failed to correct attorney Robert Bennett’s sweeping, Jones-deposition denial about Monica Lewinsky — precisely because the president was then too busy formulating an imminent perjury. Clinton wasn’t paying attention to Bennett’s misleading remarks to Judge Susan Webber Wright, according to the Judiciary Democrats. He was distracted, “thinking as fast as he could” — planning a falsehood, in other words — “as he just realized that someone was setting him up.”
Elsewhere, the Conyers report blithely announces there is “no dispute” that Clinton’s gifts to Lewinsky were returned to Betty Currie on December 28 of last year. But the White House, concerned about obstruction-of-justice charges, continues to dispute exactly this point. Elsewhere still, conversely, the Conyers report rejects out of hand the possibility that Clinton was tampering with witnesses in January when he privately told his senior aides he had never touched the intern. “He could not have known then that his staff would be called before [Ken Starr’s] grand jury,” the Judiciary Democrats insist. But he could have known, and did — as Clinton himself admitted during his own grand jury appearance in August.
And so on. Such is the nature of any complicated lie. Those inclined to sustain it first get themselves stuck in a tar of further contradiction and dishonesty. Then, pressed to the wall, they wind up wholly unmoored from fact and evidence, reduced to mere sputtering. Which is what nearly every Democratic representative did on the floor of the House last Friday and Saturday. It was sputtering of a particularly dishonorable and sinister sort.
By the language of the Democratic party’s preferred fix to the Lewinsky scandal — a congressional resolution of censure against the president — Bill Clinton has “egregiously failed” the test of his constitutional oath, “violated the trust of the American people,” and “dishonored the office which they entrusted to him.” Impeachment of such a president would plainly seem, at the very least, a plausible option. But House Democrats en masse — joining the Clinton White House in rhetorical perversion and exposing the insincerity of their censure motion all at once — were unwilling to acknowledge that any decent person could believe in the justice of impeachment. By the tenor of their arguments, House Democrats sought to demonize and delegitimize their opponents.
So now we have this situation: Bill Clinton has stained the executive branch. And in order to whitewash that stain, House Democrats have sought to stain the Congress as well.
Early in Friday’s debate, Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut called the impeachment resolution a “constitutional assassination” perpetrated by “provocateurs” and motivated by a “naked partisanship almost without lawful and civil bounds.” John Conyers warned of a “coup d’etat,” introducing an ominous phrase that would shortly — and endlessly — be repeated by his party colleagues. By debate’s end, Tom Lantos of California had likened the House impeachment proceedings to “Stalin’s parliament” and Hitler’s “Reichstag.” Our House of Representatives, Lantos told America, has become “a totalitarian legislative body.” House minority whip David Bonior, standing next to him at a press conference, eagerly assented: “I couldn’t agree more with what Tom Lantos has just said.”
At a time of utmost political sensitivity — the most important congressional vote in decades — the Democratic House minority has seen fit to prostitute itself to the personal interests of a Democratic president. To blunt the result of a constitutionally sanctioned and duly ordered inquiry into presidential malfeasance, these Democrats have seen fit loudly to proclaim — from the floor of the United States House of Representatives — that Clinton’s impeachment is, instead, the product of a banana-republic legislature run by madmen. Immediately following the vote, surrounded by his party’s caucus, House minority leader Dick Gephardt had the effrontery, on the White House lawn, to castigate his own institution as a “disgrace to our country and our Constitution.” And moments later, the president had the effrontery to praise Gephardt for this astonishing slander.
“I have accepted responsibility for what I did wrong in my personal life,” Clinton oozed in his brief remarks Saturday afternoon. But he refuses, still, to accept responsibility for the manifest wrongs of his public life — or even to allow that those wrongs are more than a hallucination. And he and his confederates now charge those who see his wrongs clearly with something close to treason.
Bill Clinton has become a genuinely poisonous presence in American politics. His impeachment now moves to trial in the Senate. The stakes could hardly be higher.
David Tell, for the Editors
