Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Let the culture war rage, let the full impeachment trial begin -- it's time for America to decide what its true values are.
Jan 6, 1999 | If you're still paying attention -- and no one would blame you if you weren't -- you know that in the last week a plan has begun to take shape in the United States Senate that would dispose of the impeachment charges against President Clinton in as few as four days. You also know that dismayed conservative politicians and commentators, who see the president they loathe once again slipping from their grasp, have responded vehemently that instead there should be a full-blown Senate trial involving testimony by witnesses and presumably lasting weeks if not months. They're right.
That they're right for the wrong reasons, having to do not with any reverence for the Constitution but bad faith, is neither here nor there. They're right because, first of all, the Constitution calls for it: When it says the Senate "shall" conduct a trial, "shall" does not mean "may" but, in the parlance of the 18th century, "will," and by implication this suggests not an "expeditious" hearing that sweeps matters under the rug, but an exhaustive one. The second reason there should be a trial is that this is no longer simply about Clinton. A trial will also be about the House of Representatives and the Republican Party, and what they did last month and why, and in a much larger sense about the presidency and impeachment itself.
In the most immediate terms, a trial will give the country one final opportunity to assess the charges the House has brought against the president. While House Republicans and the media constantly refer to perjury by Clinton as though the fact of it is incontestable, the case is actually something less than open-and-shut.
Certainly the president perjured himself in the Paula Jones civil deposition last January. But he hasn't been impeached for that; he's been impeached for his grand jury testimony last August. In a Senate trial the House Republicans would have to do something they have declined to do so far, and that's specify exactly what the perjurious testimony was. A Senate trial would remind all who have conveniently chosen to forget it that the president's grand jury testimony openly acknowledged the essence of the accusation against him, and that therefore the perjury charge revolves entirely around matters of detail: exactly when the affair began, exactly where the president touched Monica Lewinsky, whether in his own mind such contact constituted "sexual relations" -- all things virtually every legal expert has said would not, in the real world, warrant prosecution, let alone conviction.
In more far-reaching terms, a trial will test the meaning of representative democracy. Certainly congressmen are not elected to be robots, following public opinion polls slavishly, but impeachment is a constitutional device that by definition must take into account the public will because it exists for the express purpose of allowing the country -- through its elected representatives -- to reverse a grievously mistaken electoral decision. By passing impeachment articles along narrowly partisan lines in defiance of overwhelming public opinion, without allowing a censure alternative to come to the floor for a vote, House Republicans told the country that it simply doesn't comprehend the gravity of the president's misdeeds and that when it understands the matter as well as the more highly evolved minds of the House, a cloud of ignorance will lift and the "dynamic" of the scandal will change.
This was the same thinking that preceded the Republicans' decision last September to release the videotape of the president's grand jury testimony, after which his poll numbers rose six points and Congress' plummeted 12. It was the same thinking that preceded impeachment itself, after which the president's poll numbers rose yet another six points and the Republican Party's fell to the lowest in recorded history.
A trial in the Senate will either finally justify this rationale once and for all or expose it as exactly the sort of arrogance that accounts for people's bitter and growing estrangement from their own government. A trial will reveal whether, after the public rejection of impeachment in the November election, the moderate Republicans in the House initially opposed to impeachment who ultimately fell in line with their party did so because they suddenly became men for all seasons -- "voting their consciences," to quote one of the more droll catch phrases of the past month -- or because they were gripped by a kind of mass hysteria borne from relentless pressure by the party's right wing, about which history will reach its own conclusions in the decades to come. A trial will reveal whether Tom DeLay -- who, as follower of a particularly vicious Jesus, has become the religious right's most dependable congressional ally, and from whose congressional offices the most prominent religious right radio station in Washington, D.C., used to broadcast -- is now in fact the most powerful man in one of the United States' three branches of government.
But finally a Senate trial will provide a truly suitable pageant to what's been an American psychodrama. Unavoidably, in one way or another, a Senate trial would lay bare the three great lies of 1998, which were, in ascending order, the one the president told the American people in January, when he said he never had relations with Lewinsky; the one Gloria Borger of U.S. News and World Report told on PBS's "Washington Week in Review" last Friday night when she said the media "never wanted to write this story," at which point a whole country must have collapsed in convulsive laughter; and the one told so often with such increasing solemnity by the political and media establishment that they may have even come to believe it: that this entire scandal has nothing whatsoever to do with sex.
In a prolonged Senate trial -- every last second of which should be broadcast
on television -- this biggest lie will either be repeated at peril to whatever
last shred of credibility the establishment still has, or shrewdly jettisoned
for good, since the rest of the country knows full well that this matter has
everything to do with sex, that sex has provided both context and motive for
everything that's transpired. It's what compelled the president to betray his
marriage, humiliate his wife and commit the single most spectacularly stupid
political mistake of recent memory; and it's what has fueled the rage of the
political right by typifying and confirming everything it's always believed
about this president.
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