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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Convinced he is the instrument of the deity, bug killer Tom DeLay uses money and threats of political extermination to flay House Republicans into voting for impeachment. Part 4 of "The Clinton Wars."
May 8, 2003 | The November 1998 midterm election was a smashing victory for the Democrats. Instead of losing 22 seats in the House as Speaker Newt Gingrich had confidently predicted, the Democrats picked up seats -- only the second time in the century when the party of the incumbent president had done so in the midterms. The results gave a sharp, clear statement against impeachment. Instead of enjoying the fruits of victory, Gingrich was suddenly confronted by a rebellion within his own party. Overcome with anger and anxiety, worried that his own extramarital affair would be exposed, he decided in a fit of pique to resign. The Republicans' Robespierre made his last appearance before his Committee for the Public Safety, the House Republican Conference, and then walked out of the room holding hands with his wife, to return to his Georgia redoubt, where he soon left her for his mistress.
Inside the White House we thought impeachment was about to end with a whimper. After the midterm election, nothing else seemed to make sense. The matter should devolve into one that could be resolved among reasonable people. It should not be a pitched battle, but a compromise of the sort that was the daily fare of the capital. And we had approached the best connected people in Washington to try to work out with the Republicans the terms of the censure. Big wheels were in motion: Lloyd Cutler, senior partner of Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering, former counsel to both Presidents Carter and Clinton; Vin Weber, former Republican congressman, who was part of Gingrich's inner circle and head of a lobbying firm; Kenneth Duberstein, former chief of staff to President Reagan and chief of the Duberstein Group, a lobbying powerhouse; and Bob Michel, former Republican House leader.
President Clinton encouraged negotiations for a censure as the least contentious way to conclude the controversy. For weeks, even after the House Judiciary Committee had begun impeachment hearings, we continued to believe that there would be a rational solution. As late as Saturday, November 21, 1998, we were still strategizing about censure.
But by Monday it struck me that we in the White House were in denial. Why should reason prevail? We were operating on a series of false premises: rationality, self-interest, and common sense. Why should an election result unprecedented in American history reverse the dynamics of the House Republicans? Defeat might well intensify their radicalism. I told Hillary that I thought we would never get the votes to stop impeachment. "That never occurred to me," she said. Even Hillary, usually the pessimistic realist, had joined in the Pollyanna-like chorus. But why should we be right on the basis of being "reasonable"? By Thanksgiving, first Clinton's chief of staff John Podesta and then everyone else concluded that a battle over impeachment was inevitable.
The Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee inhabited a world of their own and resisted intrusions that might upset it. They had expected they would win the midterm and believed with every fiber of their beings they should have. They knew they had lost the midterm because of their insistence on trying to impeach a popular president, but they could not reverse themselves. The more the White House tried to move forward from the election result, the more they rebelled against it. The more they thought about it, the more they believed they were right. Their losing, they decided, was another of Clinton's offenses.
"The White House was arrogant," James Rogan, then a key Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, told me later. "The White House was saying, Screw you, you don't have a mandate." The account of how the Republicans were thinking that he related to me while I was writing this book was curious in its contradictions. Rogan explained the Republicans' raised expectations that fall: "Gingrich was telling us in October that we would pick up 20 or 30 seats-plus. We were going to come back with a windfall of seats." Gingrich, I learned, had even called up the president to warn him to resign before a delegation of House Democrats asked him to. "But not only did the Speaker miscalculate," Rogan said, "the way we read the results, Americans took a look at impeachment. There weren't many people on our side disputing that. There was almost no will on our part to pursue a losing strategy any further. We had hung on by our fingernails."
Right after the election, both Gingrich and his designated successor Bob Livingston talked to Rogan. Neither one thought the impeachment should go any further, he told me. And yet it did. "There was a missed opportunity, a window there," Rogan insisted, but he couldn't spell out exactly what it was. The more the White House spoke of a censure resolution instead, something "reasonable," and the more Democrats criticized the idea of impeachment, the more abused the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee felt. They didn't want to go further, but they went ahead. It wasn't their fault, but the White House's: "The White House was arrogant."
This was the logic of a vanguard consumed with its mission. They felt themselves to be "warriors," as Rogan put it. They had separated themselves from all society except their own, from any notion of political consequences, and from Republicans who didn't share their hard-shell militancy. "It happened because we were the only ones in town," Rogan said about their isolation. The House had adjourned before the election, and with Gingrich's resignation there was no Speaker; Livingston couldn't assume his position until formally elected by the next Congress. In early November, only the members of the House Judiciary Committee were in Washington. "If this had happened in March 1999," Rogan said, "when you had 535 members, there would have been a heightened sense of nervousness. You just had the small band, comfortably elected except for me." (Rogan was politically vulnerable, having squeaked by with 50.8 percent of the vote in his district in suburban Los Angeles.) "And there was nobody there who felt pain."
The "small band" of "warriors" was the tattered remnant of the Republican "revolution." They knew they couldn't sustain an impeachment vote in the next Congress -- they would have had to accept defeat and slink away, but rather than acknowledge that, they became warriors imagining victory. Alone in their bunker, they were not about to give up this fantasy, especially for politics as usual, which would reduce them to being mere congressmen among hundreds trudging through the problematical, complex tasks of cutting deals to gain appropriations for local interests and servicing the incessant needs of constituents. The more embattled they became, the greater their faith in the righteousness of their cause and the more grandiose their self-image. They could not imagine how Americans could fail to support their shining example. The scandal became their myth, and the myth became their theater of impeachment.
But the drama needed to be played out before the new Congress convened in January. The process for the impeachment and removal of a president is described in the Constitution. First the House Judiciary Committee must draft the articles of impeachment. If a majority of the entire House approves any or all of these articles, the president is impeached. A trial in the Senate is prosecuted by so-called House Managers with the chief justice of the Supreme Court serving as judge. A two-thirds majority in the Senate is required to remove a president from office.
The House Republicans would establish no standards about what constituted an impeachable offense or how to go about assessing it, but instead replay backward almost the whole reel of Clinton scandals in a surreal kaleidoscope. In the end, a majority was forced to vote not on the actual evidence, but in reaction to these gaudy tales. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Henry Hyde, and the incoming Speaker of the House, Livingston, deferred to the true power in the House, the Republican whip, Tom DeLay. Through the political machine he had constructed and controlled -- the engine of the GOP in the House, linking the party's constituency groups, corporate interests, campaign contributions, and dominance over the committee structure -- he whipped the Republicans into line, with threats if he had to. And after the House Managers entered the Senate, they contrived a desperate last gambit -- focused on me -- to topple the president.
Tom DeLay had always suspected Gingrich of weakness, had always regarded him as a rival. He had opposed him for whip in 1989, and with the Republican capture of the Congress in 1994 and Gingrich's elevation to Speaker, he had clawed his way into the post. After the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996, when Republican senators had wanted to end the self-defeating conflict with the president, DeLay had said, "Screw the Senate. It's time for all-out war!" Secretly, he had mobilized opposition to Gingrich, plotting to overthrow and replace him, yet when his internal coup had failed in 1997, his power was so secure that Gingrich dared not punish him. Now, with the equivocal Gingrich gone, Livingston quaked in DeLay's presence and did what DeLay told him to do.
DeLay lacked Gingrich's patchwork of neuroses, and having seen how Gingrich had become a bogeyman by appearing constantly on television, drawn to the light like a helpless moth, he accepted only occasional guest spots on the talk shows, preferring to operate with the curtains drawn. DeLay's plotting was unrestrained; his machinations on behalf of impeachment were the Founders' nightmare of American politics turned Roman. He held his vanity in check to focus his wrath on the president -- a wrath he believed was divinely inspired. In 2002, DeLay preached to the First Baptist Church of Pearland, Texas, that God was using him to promote "a biblical worldview" in politics, and that he had pushed for Clinton's impeachment because the president held "the wrong worldview."
Just days after the election and within hours of Gingrich's resignation, Henry Hyde held a conference call with the members of the House Judiciary Committee. According to James Rogan, he said: "We've seen the (midterm) results, but the House passed a resolution. We have an objective. Come back to Washington." Hyde posed his call in terms of grim duty. His heart wasn't in it, in fact, and he was willing to entertain private proposals for a censure motion instead. But he allowed them to fall flat and, pushed by conservative Republicans, fell back on his march, putting one foot ahead of the other and insisting wearily he had no choice. Yet he also saw himself as a statesman, playing a role that would gloriously cap his career.
When the Judiciary Committee Republicans convened on November 9, Hyde conveyed the instructions he had received from the Republican leadership: "I have been told in no uncertain terms that we need to finish the inquiry, take it to the floor, and get it voted up or down before the Christmas recess," he said.
Hyde gaveled this first session of the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment proceedings to order. It was a sprawling committee of 37 members -- 21 Republicans and 16 Democrats -- spanning the spectrum from the most conservative (Bob Barr of Georgia) to the most liberal (Barney Frank of Massachusetts). A majority of the Republicans, 11 in number, were Southern conservatives, and six were from the party's old Middle Western bastions. There was not a moderate among them.
Defeat had not tempered the Republicans, and in their trench, they fixed bayonets.
