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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
Clinton's move against Iraq raises the stakes for both parties in the impeachment debate.
Nov 30, 1998 | On Tuesday evening, it seemed like nothing could stop the headlong momentum building in the House of Representatives to vote articles of impeachment against President Clinton. One day later, the decision by the United States and Great Britain to launch a massive attack against Iraq accomplished what had seemed impossible, and managed to postpone the debate on impeachment by at least a day, and likely more.
On Wednesday evening Capitol Hill was in chaos, as Congress members and their aides, some of whom had just returned from their districts, tried to take stock of the rapidly changing situation. Aides to fence-sitting GOP House moderates expressed uncertainty over how long the impeachment vote would be delayed and what effect the sudden turn of events might have.
But even amid the chaos, divisions remained obvious between those segments of the GOP who relished their drive for impeachment and those set to vote to impeach the president only reluctantly, if at all. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott quickly came out against Clinton's move on Iraq, while retiring Rep. Gerald Solomon, R-N.Y., accused him of playing "Wag the Dog." "Never underestimate a desperate president," Solomon thundered. "This time he means business. What option is left for getting impeachment off the front page and maybe even postponed?" But such politicking wasn't playing well in the offices of GOP moderates, where aides reached early Wednesday evening expressed dismay over the more aggressively critical attacks on the president's decision.
Afraid that a prolonged delay of the impeachment vote might slow their momentum, House GOP leaders signaled Wednesday evening that the vote will only be delayed briefly, likely coming no later than Monday, and possibly sooner. Any further delay will push the measure well into Christmas week, when some might resist tackling such unpleasant business. But postponing the vote until after the holidays means it will become the business of the 106th Congress, where Democrats have at least five more votes, and the hard-line Republican leadership seems unlikely to let the issue get away.
For the GOP, pressing the impeachment vote under present circumstances is a risky strategy. But the pro-impeachment strategy the GOP has been pushing with increasing aggressiveness in recent weeks was already a high-stakes gamble, and the pressure that had already been applied to wavering moderate Republicans was fierce. Some continued to protest. "It's going to be like the government shutdowns," one frustrated House GOP staffer told Salon. But few Republicans were willing to concede, even off the record, that the GOP will face such bitter consequences for impeaching the president. And in the echo-chamber environment that Washington has become over the last week, some had apparently convinced themselves that there will be little price to pay, even though polls still show that almost two-thirds of the public remains firmly opposed to impeachment.
Why have moderate Republicans been lining up to declare their support for impeachment? The answer lies in a particularly brutal night-of-the-long-knives politics that has been practiced by pro-impeachment Republicans in the House, which has carried the day over the objections of the moderates.
Ever since the Republicans took over the House in 1994, a group of roughly 40 Republican moderates, predominantly from the Northeast, have served as a sort of electoral canary in a coal mine, signaling the House Republicans by their defection when the party's agenda became too noxiously conservative for the country as a whole. That's what happened during the government shutdowns of 1995; and it happened again in 1996 when the moderates agreed to raise the minimum wage and abandoned the GOP's rabidly anti-environmental party line. Jack Quinn, perhaps the quintessential Northeastern moderate, told me last August that decisions like that had "saved the majority" for the GOP.
But over the last week and a half, the word has gone out to Republican congressmen across the country that on the question of impeachment, there can be no compromise. Even Quinn, who until the weekend had been counted as dead set against impeachment, jumped shipped and announced on Tuesday that he would vote for it.
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