A profile in courage, it was not.
No Republican stood tall to say that the case against President Clinton was not the stuff of impeachment when it would have mattered, before the outcome was so clear. None criticized the Republican prosecutors or Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. No Democrat took the bold step of saying that Clinton should be removed, the polls be damned. No member of Clinton’s Cabinet resigned in protest.
“Impartial justice,” apparently, wears a partisan robe.
The only politicians who came through the historic trial with their reputations enhanced were the ones who wrote the Constitution more than 210 years ago. The process worked, but it was hardly uplifting.
The Senate impeachment trial of the president was a political pageant, long on ceremony and rhetoric, lacking in substance and suspense.
The monthlong trial in the Senate that followed the monthslong inquiry in the House brought Congress to the same place that the vast majority of the country had been for nearly a year: Clinton’s wrongful, wretched conduct did not warrant his removal.
A search will begin for deeper meaning, larger political and societal consequences, but the quest might well be in vain.
The nation’s children have seen the fiction of the cannot-tell-a-lie armor of our presidents, their views becoming more like those of most adults. The presidency has suffered another scar, reinforcing a generational cynicism that began with Lyndon Johnson’s lies about Vietnam, reached a peak during Richard Nixon’s Watergate and was revisited during Ronald Reagan and George Bush’s Iran-contra.
But despite the fixation of official Washington and the cable news channels–remember that the Big Three networks televised precious little of the “historic” trial–much of the nation tuned out. Geraldo and the producers at MSNBC will no doubt go through withdrawal as the stock in the scandal industry takes a nose dive.
The trial was so lacking in drama that it quickly lost out in the competition for the American minute. Many passed up their chance to be witnesses to history.
Some Republicans, like self-appointed national morality czar William Bennett, voiced outrage that there was no outrage in the country. Those sentiments are likely to have strong echo in some quarters during the campaign for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000.
But the peril for Republicans is that the same majority that condemned Clinton’s conduct but did not think it threatened the republic will reject such a siren call. Clearly, the trial demonstrated the need for Republicans to offer the nation a positive agenda, lest they be labeled the party of anger, disgust and moral absolutism.
Democrats have a challenge in a mirror image. They must not be seen as condoning the deplorable behavior of the leader of their party. The White House has vowed to be a gloat-free zone, but the temptation will prove powerful.
Some instant analysis derided the process as too political, but that misses the point. The beauty of impeachment lies in part in how difficult it is to achieve. It was designed to be political, excruciatingly so.
The burden is on the party bringing the charges, in this case the Republicans. They failed because their case was not strong enough to tear down the partisan wall that divides them from Democrats. Their case was too weak, and no degree of dressing it up in Rep. Henry Hyde’s high-minded rhetorical clothing could hide that critical fact.
The case failed for many reasons, among them the strategic calculation not to call witnesses during the hearings of the House Judiciary Committee. Instead, the Republicans said they were functioning merely as a grand jury, a charging body, thinking that the Senate would somehow make the hard call of demanding the live testimony of Monica Lewinsky, Vernon Jordan, Betty Currie and others. Instead, Republican senators were furious that the heavy lifting had been passed to them.
If the process had truly been about fact-finding, one of the stated functions of a grand jury, House Republicans were duty-bound to call witnesses, and to conduct a full, fair and wide-ranging investigation. Instead, they essentially tied a ribbon around the report handed to them by Starr and sent it on to the Senate.
Hyde said repeatedly that his committee was not moved by opinion polls, then cited a need to finish the House vote on the articles of impeachment before the end of last year because the American people wanted it brought to a swift conclusion. He did not mention that in the midterm elections Democrats had made historic gains, paring the GOP majority in the House to a slender six votes for any matter taken up in the newly constituted Congress.
The Democrats showed little courage as well, declining to call witnesses themselves and offering little in the way of exculpatory evidence for the president. And the same Clinton lawyers who were willing to stipulate to all the facts in Starr’s report in exchange for a plea bargain went on to attack every fact as untrue before the Senate.
As the Senate trial progressed, the House managers offered up a list of just three witnesses, the “pitiable three” in Hyde’s words, to try to make a case they knew was doomed. They could have offered up a full list of witnesses and allowed the Republican-controlled Senate to vote it down, but they chose the path of expedience.
The Senate further handicapped any chance the House managers might have had by voting to take videotaped depositions first to avoid the spectacle of a potentially emotionally overwrought Lewinsky on the floor of the Senate discussing her illicit affair with the president, a man old enough to be her father.
But even in the depositions, particularly in the questioning of Lewinsky, House prosecutors fell short. She seemed to control the tone and content of her answers, with Rep. Ed Bryant (R-Tenn.), reportedly chosen to question her because she had found him the least objectionable of the prosecutors, treading gingerly around sensitive areas. Then it was Bryant who complained on the Senate floor that Lewinsky seemed to be uncooperative and still in the president’s camp.
The tougher questions, apparently, will have to wait for Lewinsky’s interview with Barbara Walters.
House managers raised potentially explosive issues late in the case, such as charges of other possible criminal misconduct by the president, matters that had been in the public domain for months and could have been thoroughly investigated.
If vital issues remained unresolved, as House managers and some Republican senators insisted, the Republican majority nonetheless rejected the opportunity to question any of the witnesses in the well of the Senate.
Then the senators voted to deliberate in private, supposedly to engender candor, only to have several of them rushing to the microphones within minutes of speaking behind closed doors, to air their views in public. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) mocked the process by giving his summation to the media before he gave it to Senate colleagues.
Impeachment in the Information Age clearly took on a different cast than the now seemingly quaint trial of President Andrew Johnson. This impeachment helped prop up the corporate imperatives of at least three fledgling cable television channels, providing non-stop programming of unceasing chatter. The senators talked about the vow of silence they would take during a trial, which actually amounted to silence only until they had left the Senate chamber. For nearly a month, at least 20 percent of the Senate dominated the news talk shows each Sunday, with plenty of daily appearances in between.
The trial established that senators were some new hybrid of judge and juror and that they could use any standard they wished to determine the president’s guilt or innocence. It demonstrated that any conventional conflict-of-interest concerns did not apply.
Where else could White House lawyers have former clients among the juror-judges? White House counsel Charles Ruff had represented Democratic Sen. Chuck Robb of Virginia.
Where else could one of the prosecutors have a brother who was a juror? Sen. Tim Hutchinson (R-Ark.) even shares an apartment with prosecutor Rep. Asa Hutchinson in Washington.
It is easy to write a script that ends with Republicans harmed greatly for bringing this spectacle to the nation, taking the air out of public discussion of other issues for month after month. Or that Democrats could suffer from supporting a deeply flawed president.
But either view carries the faulty premise that Americans closely followed every development in the case.
Instead, most Americans seem to share the sentiments expressed by spectator Richard Douglas Llamas when he shouted from the visitor’s gallery in the Senate: “God almighty, take the vote and get it over with!”
It is.
