The House Judiciary Committee exercised raw partisan politics when it decided to release President Clinton’s grand jury testimony and 2,800 pages of supporting documentation in all its lurid detail about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and his efforts to cover it up.
Perhaps that is precisely what should be happening as a prelude to any impeachment, the most primal of political decisions in a democracy.
The politics will be loud and messy and often motivated by self-interest, filling the airwaves with recriminations, fueling even more public debate. Fundamentally, though, it will likely come to reflect the public will and resolve the issue of whether the American people want to fire their president.
The ultimate campaign has begun. Its importance extends beyond the moment’s passions or the next election and could fundamentally shape how Americans view the institutions of Congress and the presidency.
Republicans used the power of their majority to force the release of the material submitted to them by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. They had a choice, and they exercised it with maximum potential damage to the president apparently in mind. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) derided the GOP’s acts as “unilateral bipartisanship.”
Democrats, hardly unified in their feelings about their president, marched as one on this issue, decrying the vote as unfair and as doing violence to the Constitution. They want the debate to shift to one about process. “We got off on a very bad footing,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.)
The power of technology and the force of television, in particular, are being employed by Republicans as political tools in the name of the lofty sentiment that the people have a right to know.
But the unparalleled release of information Monday is designed, at least in part, to shape the public’s view of their president before the House casts votes on whether to start a formal impeachment inquiry.
Democrats counter that in the lower-tech age of Watergate, the House Judiciary Committee considered evidence for seven weeks, allowed President Richard Nixon’s lawyers to cross-examine witnesses, and reached final conclusions before releasing documentary evidence.
Their collective cry is that the Constitution is now a casualty.
“This is not about defending the president,” said Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.). “This is about defending the Constitution and defending a concept every American understands and that is fundamental fairness.”
Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the committee’s ranking Democrat, said: “The problem is that we are trying to have a citizens’ jury on material coming from the prosecutor.”
“Instead of fairness, some Republicans want to rush the release of salacious material, defying the finest traditions of the House of Representatives,” said White House spokesman Barry Toiv. “What I’m objecting to is the lack of bipartisanship, lack of fairness in the process.”
It is along such fault lines that great political battles are waged.
Are Republicans merely trying to embarrass Clinton by piling on the explicit detail of his trysts with Lewinsky to an even greater extent than the Starr report to Congress? Is this just about “sex, sex and more sex,” as Rep. Steven Rothman (D-N.J.) described it. Or are they allowing the American people to see the raw evidence that Starr used to reach his conclusions that Clinton should be impeached to see if they concur?
Some committee members conceded that their votes came before even they had reviewed all the material that the committee voted to release to the public. That didn’t stop lawmakers from debating the matter for hours behind closed doors.
“I think every decision was made before anybody took a step into that room,” said Thomas Barrett (D-Wis.), a committee member who said he had spent several hours looking over the evidence but was nowhere near finished before he was asked to vote. “The House rules require that both Democrats and Republicans be on that committee, but the Republican (House leadership) made the decision, so we went in there and took votes and did exactly what they said.
“We have been hearing that the president should be treated the same as other Americans and what we did today (Friday) was extraordinary because few, if any, Americans who appear before a grand jury have their testimony released publicly, especially in any proceeding against them. That argument fell on deaf ears. The president did something wrong. But what we have here is a situation where Congress decided to release his testimony, before we could determine what it was, to drive public opinion.”
Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), who was elected to Congress in 1969 and recalls the Watergate days, called the House a “snake pit.” He sees not promise but peril in the scandal devolving into partisanship.
He concedes that he was among those House members who voted two weeks ago to authorize the release of most of the materials, but he said that he feels duped in the same way that President Lyndon Johnson misled lawmakers into voting for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which allowed U.S. military escalation in Vietnam.
He said that the House cannot continue to function in a climate of acrimony if it is to retain its credibility with the people.
After Watergate, he recalled, he would walk into high schools to talk to students and be met with an almost reflexive resistance to him as a politician. He thinks the same might be true after this inquiry.
“I think people will take a look at the incredible snake pit the House has become and say I wouldn’t trust you guys to make any decision.
“How are they going to make a judgment when, for the first three weeks, they have gotten the presentation one side wanted it to see?” Obey asked. “In a democracy, when you have people with very different views about issues and personalities the only thing that can unite people is procedural fairness. And it does nobody any good if the country concludes that this is such a partisan dance that there will be no legitimate conclusions reached from that process. That’s a horrible result, and this is the worst possible beginning.”
But that dance has begun, and there is no sign the tune will change.
