End Perpetual Politicized Witch Hunts
Henry Hyde, Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, may be premature in raising the issue of impeachment as the way to deal with the latest accusations against Bill Clinton these are, after all, still contested accusations but he is right on the principle.
The Constitution’s tried-and-true way of assuring presidential accountability, which is to permit the House of Representatives to impeach the president and the U.S. Senate then to try him, is still the only very sensible way to assure the president is not above the law. All our efforts to find something between congressional oversight and impeachment are turning out to be not very satisfactory.
As a result of the Watergate scandal, the country sought to institutionalize the idea of a special prosecutor, insulated from the authority of the attorney general and the president, to investigate and prosecute violations of law in the executive branch. Again and again, though, whether invoked against Republican or Democratic administrations, the special prosecutor law has often produced more questions than answers.
If the charges President Clinton had an affair with a young White House intern and asked her to lie about it turn out to be untrue, as the president insists they are, Kenneth Starr’s role in the episode will surely be the final undoing of the special counsel law. Neither party would want to defend the sort of open-ended fishing expedition Starr’s investigation had become if it turns out that these charges are untrue.
Even if Starr is right about what these tapes of Monica Lewinsky’s conversations show, though, his handling of his work heretofore has been so tainted by his own partisanship that the work of the special prosecutor does not offer a very sensible way to get to the bottom of this mess.
This country does mean to insist presidents are not above the law, and Bill Clinton had better understand that. That’s why those checks and balances, including the impeachment powers, are built into the Constitution.
In at least one sense, I have regretted that Richard Nixon resigned the presidency rather than let impeachment run its course. The idea that an elected president can be hounded out of office, rather than be removed through impeachment, has proven to be dangerous. If it were now to be followed by a similar result in Bill Clinton’s case, the long-term damage to the country might be doubly hard for the Republic to withstand. What the New Republic has called the criminalization of American politics is a high-risk game.
I also believe the Supreme Court’s decision about the right of a citizen to sue a sitting president, while understandable and in some sense a victory for the rule of law, has produced an unhealthy result - a well-endowed partisan effort to use the Paula Jones case as a political weapon. Civil suits against the president aren’t the best way to assure presidential accountability.
So how do we do it? The best means at our disposal are still congressional oversight in normal times and impeachment when enough members of the House believe there’s reason to impeach. If the president did indeed urge the young woman perjure herself, that plainly is an impeachable offense. It deserves to be addressed by people who are themselves accountable through elections, in open proceedings, with firmly established rules.
And while an affair with a young woman less than half his age is not an impeachable offense, it is not something the American people will take lightly.
People understand that presidents are human. But this story, if it proves true, suggests an arrogance and immaturity that are dangerous.
Clinton has denied the charges. He’s entitled to the presumption of innocence. The way in which the taping came about and got into Starr’s hands is troubling. Unfortunately, though, Clinton is faced now with a practical and political need to prove his innocence - always a hard thing to do.
The country has been willing to cut its presidents a lot of slack and to discount the things said about them. If Monica Lewinsky confirms the story, contradicting her earlier affidavit, there will surely have to be an accounting.
The best way to get that accounting is still the old-fashioned way - to have the House of Representatives see whether there is enough of a consensus to bring impeachment charges and, if so, then to see whether the Senate can convict on those charges. Our attempts to find some other means, short of impeachment, have devolved into clumsy leaks and feeding frenzies with very little hope of credible resolution.
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