The House of Representatives voted Saturday, for the first time in a century, to impeach the president of the United States. This newspaper, as have many other American dailies, called on the House to reject the articles of impeachment against President Clinton, and to pass a motion of censure against him. This course was also recommended by a huge majority of American academics, typified by several professors brought to Washington by the president to testify in his defense before the House Judiciary Committee.
The Tribune’s thinking, and that of the academics, was that the acts charged against President Clinton are not of the gravity to warrant impeachment–that they amount, in the vernacular, to “lying about sex”–and that to raise them to the level of impeachable offenses would be to plunge the nation into the “political hell” of a protracted Senate trial. At a deeper level, the Tribune and many other newspapers and scholars are concerned that impeachment could become another partisan tool and further debase and destroy our constitutional scheme of government and our political discourse.
Sadly, the Tribune, the other newspapers and the majority of American academics have got things exactly backwards. As listeners to Henry Hyde’s extraordinary speech opening the impeachment debate heard, as careful readers of the House Judiciary Committee’s recently issued report know, and as those who observed the testimony of a majority of the scholars at the Constitution Subcommittee’s hearing on the history and background of impeachment last month understand, the president’s offenses certainly do rise to the constitutional level of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and are precisely the sort of acts the framers designed the impeachment and removal process for.
What the president is charged with doing, when all the political chaff is blown away, is seeking, in his own interest, to deny a young woman who brought a federal civil rights and state tort case against him her rights, to enlist others in a conspiracy to help him accomplish this misdeed, and then to commit further perjuries and obstruction of justice in the course of seeking to cover up and deny his misconduct. This isn’t “lying about sex,” this is a failure to see that the laws are faithfully executed (the president’s constitutional obligation), and these acts, if true, amount to serious felonies.
As Chairman Hyde has reminded us, it is the boast of our constitutional system–the one of which the framers were proudest–that ours is a government of laws, not men, and that anyone, weak or powerful, can count on the objective administration of the legal system. In the impeachment articles, President Clinton is charged with dishonestly and corruptly manipulating that system not only to deny Paula Jones her rights, but also to frustrate the grand jury proceedings of the executive and judicial branches, and the investigations of the legislative branch of government.
All of this may have started as an obscure civil matter, but when the president chose to begin his alleged course of misconduct it quickly ballooned into a vicious debacle of constitutional proportions. We have reached a situation where the president’s now-admitted mendaciousness casts grave doubts over his motives and timing in his attack on Iraq. In Federalist 64, James Madison warned that the president’s conduct of foreign affairs under the constitution demanded that he have great discretion, and that he could only exercise that discretion if he had the trust of the American people. In reply to critics who questioned whether this discretion and power under the new Constitution were too much to put into any one person’s hands, Madison indicated that the impeachment power would be available to guarantee that the president would be worthy of such trust.
The federal Constitution itself came about because of a perception that the new governments in the states had fallen into corruption, and that state legislators were pursuing their own interests rather than those of the people. The presidential selection mechanism, the creation of an upper house of Congress somewhat removed from the political maelstrom, and the impeachment procedures were all means of seeking to guarantee that the officers of the federal government would operate in the interests of the people and not corruptly manipulate the engines of government for their own benefit.
George Washington, in particular, picked as the first president because he was the epitome of national virtue and honor, had something to say to us about the proceedings against President Clinton. In his farewell address, widely regarded as a core American screed with a status similar to that of the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address, Washington warned that if the oaths sworn by federal officials or by litigants in court ever lost their sense of sacred obligation, the foundations of the American republic would crumble. Our entire constitutional scheme, he believed (along with the other framers) depended on the trust and honesty of federal officials, and the objective testimony of witnesses in the courts.
The acts that the president has been charged with doing would have received the condemnation of Madison and Washington. The phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” was a deliberately ambiguous phrase, borrowed from English history, and designed to cover the kinds of abuse of office for personal ends for which it had been invoked in England to remove officials for misconduct over the course of four centuries. Impeachment of the president by the House and a trial on these charges by the Senate will not plunge us into “political hell.” They will reinforce our commitment to the rule of law, strengthen the trust of the people in our institutions, and warn future officials of the grave consequences of their corruption.
To have forgone impeachment, and to have given the president the meaningless and probably unconstitutional slap on the wrist of a censure proceeding, would have been for the members of Congress to betray their oaths to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law it represents. The now inevitable Senate trial may not be free from difficulty for the senators, for the public, and for the president. But as the debates before the House for the last few weeks have made clear, if we are to remain faithful to our constitutional tradition of the rule of law–one, which as Hyde stressed, begins with the 10 Commandments, and includes 3,000 years of a struggle for ordered liberty–we have no other choice.
