Rep. Barr calls impeachment the only constitutional remedy

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 20, 1998 | by Stephen Goode

The sponsor of a House bill to begin an impeachment inquiry against Bill Clinton wonders whether Americans who continue to support the president are reading from the same script as most of the rest of us.

Georgia Republican Rep. Bob Barr is the sponsor of HR304, which calls on "the Committee on the Judiciary to undertake an inquiry into whether grounds exist to impeach William Jefferson Clinton, the President of the United States." The bill has 18 cosponsors.

For Barr, a lawyer, a former analyst for the CIA and former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, an impeachment inquiry is the only honest way for Congress to deal with the scandals that surround Clinton. Any other approach, he believes, would be an abrogation of the responsibility placed on Congress by the U.S. Constitution. The Founding Fathers, Barr tells Insight, did not "provide for an independent counsel or special prosecutor, they provided for impeachment."

Insight: The Congress seems reluctant to contemplate impeachment.

Bob Barr: Many of our members just don't seem very interested in taking any sort of leadership role pursuing investigations, perusing evidence or holding people in the executive branch accountable. They don't really seem to be that concerned about it.

Some, I suppose, look at Clinton's high approval ratings in the polls and use that as an excuse not to do something. Others seem to think they'll get some sort of partisan political advantage from doing nothing.

Insight: What do you say when people say Clinton's doing a good job, the economy's fine, leave him alone?

BB: It's certainly a very frustrating argument. First, it doesn't take any character to run an economy. Character has nothing to do with that.

People confuse the technical and economic aspects of our national well-being with what the presidency is about. The reason for having a government is not to run the economy. Yet that has become the issue around which everyone now determines how an administration is doing. Is the economy performing well? Of course it was never the intention of our Founding Fathers to have the federal government run the economy. Nonetheless that is the criterion in a lot of people's minds, and that's unfortunate.

I think our Founding Fathers would be more than a little upset if they saw the way we've cheapened government and denigrated character. Character and integrity were very, very important to the Founding Fathers. I think it was Daniel Webster who said the United States has given the world the character of a George Washington, and if we received credit for nothing else in our history that fact alone should make us the envy of the world.

Insight: A lot of people say we shouldn't bring down the administration simply because of the sexual dalliances of a randy president.

BB: We're not talking about a presidential dalliance. That's not what we're looking at. That's not what's important here. What's important are issues that are fundamental to our nation's security.

One is foreign influence. Is there illicit foreign influence on our country based on foreign money coming in? Are decisions being made on the basis of somebody's national-security interests other than America's national-security interests? Also, has there been misuse of the world's most powerful law-enforcement and investigative agency, the FBI? That's something that ought to scare the socks off every American.

And, do we have a president who is at the core a liar and willing to do anything to cover up those lies? Shouldn't we hold the president to a higher standard?

Insight: What does impeachment mean to you?

BB: Far too many Americans don't have any appreciation for the history and institutions of our country. Therefore, when one of these institutions is under attack, as the office of the presidency is right now, they don't know enough about it to come to the defense of the office -- not the man, but the office.

The Constitution is a great document, and one of the most important things about it is that every word has meaning. The Founding Fathers argued endlessly. I mean, you look at the silly debates we have in the Congress now -- 220 years ago, they would sit there for hours and have substantive, eloquent, reasoned, intellectual debates over every single word in that Constitution.

They also recognized some things about human nature, and one is that at some point in our history someone would abuse the power that the people had placed in their leaders, that someone would abuse even the highest office. So the Founding Fathers did what they did with every other principle on which our government is based: They provided a remedy -- and that remedy is impeachment.

They didn't provide for an independent counsel. They didn't provide for a special prosecutor. They provided for impeachment. It wasn't a new idea, it was something that had been tried and tested over hundreds of years of British history, and they were very explicit about what it was designed to do and how it was to be used.

Insight: But we tend to be very timid about using that remedy.