The Week

National Review, Dec 31, 1998

* "If [Arkansas representative] Jay Dickey votes to impeach the President, it's probably an indication he will not run for re-election in 2000," said a White House source. "It's suicide-we will make sure it is." In Arkansas, that's a death threat.

Ed.'s Note: This issue of National Review goes to press two days before the scheduled vote on impeachment in the House of Representatives.

* The arguments in favor of impeaching President William Jefferson Clinton (to follow the idiom of the articles voted by the Judiciary Committee) come down to this: 1) His behavior was disreputable. He deceived the courts and the American people. 2) The gravity of his offense is best measured by the disgusted attention that has been given to what he did. 3) The arguments in his defense have been semantic and legalistic. The argument that the Constitution forbids the process now underway is sheer advocacy based on opportunistic exegesis. 4) The objection that the American people are opposed to impeachment ignores culture lags of historical frequency, including general opposition to the liberation of the slaves, to full participation in the war against Hitler, and to the need to take action against Iraq in 1991. 5) The true test of the stability of the Constitution is its usefulness in liberating the country from miscast faith in a failed leader. 6) The profiles of courage in the contemporary scene will highlight the Republican and Democratic Congressmen who summon the courage to do the right thing.

* No such honor will attach to those Congressmen who support the posited alternative of censure. A censure resolution that imposed a fine, or a "voluntary payment," on President Clinton would be unconstitutional as a bill of attainder, a change in a sitting President's compensation, and an illegitimate use of the threat of impeachment as a political club. It would thus weaken the presidency to save this President. A censure resolution that imposed no punishment, on the other hand, would have as much force as Congress's resolution demanding free elections in Gabon (a comparison explicitly made by censure advocate Sen. Joe Lieberman). The President's partisans complain bitterly that Republicans are not allowing a vote on censure. But the Constitution provides an option for a Congress confronted by presidential malfeasance, and Congressmen may properly be asked to act on it or not.

* Yet the fundamental issue is the nature of republican government (N.B.: not government by Republicans). Those who hold power forfeit their right to rule when they misuse it. When the Founders discussed possible motives for misrule, they concentrated on personal factors-avarice, ambition-in a way that can seem naive in an age of ideology (Alger Hiss did not betray his country for the Bokhara rug). Yet it is equally naive to ignore the eternal passions of men. If the people's representatives fail to call a bad ruler to account, whatever his motives, then the people effectively forfeit the right to rule themselves. Life and history are long, and a nation can always recover. "There are no lost causes," Russell Kirk liked to remind us, "because there are no gained causes." But it is always better to uphold one's dignity at the moment it is challenged, than to trust to time and our descendants to win it back.

* President Clinton, in his December 11 non-apology, quoted a stanza of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. His legal team evidently did not vet the whole poem.

Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before

I swore-but was I sober when I swore?

And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in-hand

My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore.

* Among the oddest bits of flotsam during the Week of the Judiciary Committee was the fetishistic refusal of the President and his supporters to call his behavior "perjury." Maybe, they sometimes seemed to be saying, it was only lying under oath. Maybe if he actually thought he was telling the truth-or claimed he thought he was-then his lies weren't really lies. Did they put themselves and us through these contortions out of a genuine fear of a perjury prosecution after Mr. Clinton leaves office? Come on. If he escaped now with a censure, the consequence of a confession on his part . . .well, would even Inspector Javert pursue him into the new millennium? His stubbornness has a deeper source. For Mr. Clinton to admit perjury would be to admit to himself that there are some situations he cannot talk his way out of. And that would truly be an unacceptable admission.

* House Majority Whip Tom DeLay "is addicted to the thuggish tactics of the Gingrich era," according to the New York Times. He "is playing a devious game." His offense? Continuing to advocate impeachment and oppose censure- which is to say, sticking to the position the New York Times itself took until November 20. As Dan Seligman pointed out in the New York Post, until that day, the Times was insisting that Clinton would have to admit that he lied under oath before censure could be considered an adequate substitute for impeachment. Absent a guilty plea, the paper said, "we are prepared to see the impeachment process through to a resolution." But the 11/20 editorial suddenly proclaimed that censure was "the correct remedy unless new evidence emerges." Over night, Clinton's "misconduct," which had previously been held to endanger "the rule of law," needed to be placed in perspective (it "did not occur in the context of national security or the misuse of key agencies"). Back on September 20, we were told that impeachment "need not traumatize the nation"; but now Clinton's ouster would be a "trauma" the nation should be spared. Judging from the Times's fulminations against Mr. DeLay-he is also accused of "blustering" and speaking "pure hogwash"-the very thought of impeachment, beginning two months after the summer equinox, has certainly been traumatic for its editorialist.