There is no better measure of the lasting strength of constitutional government, and of the wisdom of the people who constructed it so long ago, than the outcome of the impeachment proceedings against President William Jefferson Clinton.
The intent in the beginning was to have the passion of politics play out at full volume in that most representative of political institutions, the House of Representatives. Then the structure dictated that all of the heat would move to a much cooler, calmer place, the Senate, for a decision.
That is exactly what happened.
Everything the House Republicans could find was collected, tabulated and presented in agonizing detail. No one was muzzled. The majority had its way with this case, not only in the collection of the evidence, but in its intepretation and its presentation too.
Then the whole steaming mass moved from the chamber of passions to the chamber of deliberation, where the House managers said whatever they needed to say, the president’s defenders delivered their case, and the decision finally was made.
It happened precisely the way the founding fathers intended for it to happen, despite the presence of television, despite external political strategies and despite the worst intentions of people on all sides of the process.
It is almost as though the politicians had found an elegant, 18th Century clock hidden away in a basement closet. They brought it out, dusted it off, wound it up and stood back and marveled as it worked exactly as well as it did on the day it was assembled.
Without question, the firebreathers who have hated this president the most, who view him as beyond shame and beyond redemption, will chastise the process, criticize the outcome and condemn both the prosecutors who presented the case and the senators who ultimately decided it.
If only there had been live witnesses. If only there had been more time. If only everyone agreed with our interpretation of events. If only. . . All of those issues were decided politically in the Senate by majority votes.
The complainers might just as well invent a time machine to carry their crabbing back to the 18th Century, because that is where the wellspring of their problem rests.
Clinton remains president because the Founding Fathers wanted to make impeachment difficult and rare. They didn’t want the nation to shed its presidents over minor political disputes or personality flaws or misbehavior that fell short of damaging to the nation’s interests.
The assumption was that the people would make their decision about presidents every four years, when they could dump anyone they didn’t want in the office.
Don’t underestimate the weight the Clinton impeachment is likely to carry in history. If it ever really was about sex, about perjury, about obstruction of justice, none of that has much to do with the actual outcome.
From the very day Kenneth Starr opened his investigation until Friday afternoon at about 1:30 p.m. Chicago time, when Clinton offered one more apology and eloquently noted that one cannot ask forgiveness unless he can offer it, the impeachment has been about one thing.
Process.
If that sounds dry and dispassionate given the nature of the charges against the president, so be it. But consider the value of process in a world in which governments rise and fall with barometric frequency, in which the sword so often is used to hack away at knots that will not yield to civil political debate.
The United States doesn’t have coups.
The United States doesn’t have government-inspired assassinations. (Don’t go there with wild speculations about John Kennedy’s death.)
The United States does not have complicated parliamentary processes in which the collapse of consensus spells the disappearance of prime ministers who lose popular support.
Now it can be said without hesitation: The United States does not drive presidents from office for behaviors that, however distasteful, fall far light of the weight necessary to constitute a high crime that threatens the existence of constitutional government.
Look to the other side of the world for a moment and consider Boris Yeltsin’s military assault on the Russian White House, where the parliament resides.
It didn’t take him very long to shift from being the hero on the tank during the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev to playing a much more despotic role in his conflict with parliament.
That was applying the sword to the knot.
Look again at what came of it all, a collapsing government, a pathetically weak presidency and political cacophony.
That is what happens when a nation constructs a government of personalities and ideology and not of laws. Those kinds of places can only perform as well, and as nobly, as the character who heads the government.
They should all long for the elegant structure we have had in place for more than two centuries.
There was something immensely consoling about an impeachment trial with Chief Justice William Rehnquist sitting in the big chair, looking down as though he were a great bald eagle observing the surface of a lake in case a fish might break water.
The Senate was so impressed by his performance that it awarded him a resolution and one of those shiny, Chamber of Commerce-quality plaques suitable for hanging. It was a nice gesture, but it in no way set the proper measure of the role he played.
He was there to guarantee that the process would be full of fairness, that it would play out dispassionately, precisely as was intended. The Founding Fathers were obviously shy about legal shenanigans, which is why they wanted the chief justice in the chair as impeachment played out.
Racing stripes on his sleeves and all, he sent a most comforting message throughout an event that by its very nature was packed full of uncertainty and discomfort: The law is here and it will be applied fairly.
A groundswell of media babbling developed immediately after the verdict about the long-term political implications of this failed impeachment attempt. There have already been hints that the White House will be out for blood, that the Republicans will have a high price to pay for pursuing folly, that a new Democratic era was dawning.
But none of that is big enough to stand up to the weight of the event.
The nation has marched straight to the edge of a cliff during the past year, led by political enemies who have long been convinced the man in the White House is evil and not worthy of the job.
At the last moment, they were held back by a very old, rarely used set of restraints.
Clinton’s place in history undoubtedly has been tarnished by his own behavior and by the aggressive pursuit that it spawned, but the presidency is intact, along with the sense that, somehow, the process worked just as intended.
Not that there won’t be a great price to pay.
Some congressional Republicans may well find themselves swept from office the next time around. Democrats could well have a day in the sun to gloat and jeer and play the role of victor after a long battle.
But what of the man at the center of it all?
Look to history for the answer.
The last president to come this close to impeachment was Andrew Johnson, who was saved by one vote in the Senate in 1868. Basically, he was almost forced from office for disrespecting Congress, which wanted to grab control of Cabinet appointments so it could force the will of the Republican radicals on the process of Reconstruction after the Civil War.
He died at home in Tennessee in 1875. This note, written in June 1873, was found among his effects:
“All seems gloom and despair. I have performed my duty to my God, my country and my family. I have nothing to fear in approaching death. To me it is the mere shadow of God’s protecting wing . . . Here I will rest in quiet and peace, beyond the reach of calumny’s poisoned shaft, the influence of envy and jealous enemies, where treason and traitors or state backsliders and hypocrites in church can have no place.”
