India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 01 :: Jan. 02 - 15, 1999

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WORLD AFFAIRS

A President on trial

Bill Clinton becomes the second President of the U.S., and the first elected President, to be impeached by the House of Representatives.

SRIDHAR KRISHNASWAMI
in Washington

WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON, the 42nd President of the United States, knew that a shameful experience was coming his way. Yet, he could do precious little about it. The Republicans stuck together and made sure that they returned at least one count of impeachment in the House of Representatives. And when all the speeches, rhetoric and drama ended on December 19, Clinton became the second U.S. President, and the first elected President, to be impeached by the House of Representatives. The two counts returned against Clinton were those relating to "perjury" in the Federal Grand Jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky investigation and to "obstruction of justice".

The spectacle now moves to the Senate where the 100 members will sit as "jurors" in proceedings that will be run by "prosecutors" from the House Judiciary Committee, led by Henry Hyde, and presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist. A two-thirds vote in the Senate is required to remove a President from office.

IN a spin city that has come to be known for different things in the last several months, the impeachment circus was not without its dramatic moments - moments that will have a lasting effect on political parties and institutions. The Speaker-elect, Robert Livingston, stunned his Republican colleagues when he said on the floor of the House that he would not take up the post on January 6, 1999 and that within six months of that date he would leave the Congress. The reason was that investigations carried out by the media and other interested parties were close to revealing that he had "strayed" in his marriage of 33 years and that such relationships involved more than one woman.

Livingston's announcement, made in the closing stages of the impeachment debate and in the beginning of the four-phased voting, had at least two important aspects. First, from a political perspective, Livingston argued that he could not, in good conscience, call for Clinton's resignation without setting an example himself. Secondly, there was a practical problem. As soon as news regarding his infidelity filtered out, there were rumblings in the deeply conservative faction in the Republican Party. After all Livingston is no stranger to politics: he knows full well that the campaign he carried out to get rid of the out-going Speaker Newt Gingrich from office would come to haunt him and that his effectiveness would be sapped in the 106th Congress. This was one of the major reasons for Livingston's decision to quit. And if he can do this in a blaze of drama and theatrics, why not?

DOUG MILLS/AP
President Bill Clinton and Hillary, accompanied by Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, arrive at the D.C. Central Kitchen in Washington on December 21, where they volunteered to prepare food for the homeless at the emergency shelter.

In one sense, the Clinton administration was caught off guard by Livingston's move. Immediately, there was a desperate call for him to reconsider his decision. However, those in the know of things make the point that Clinton has no intention of following Livingston's example. White House insiders and ardent supporters of the President say that Clinton is a fighter who will fight to the finish. For their part, right-wing Conservatives describe the President's action, or lack of it, as "shameless", and add that he will do "anything to hang on".

IN the days leading up to the impeachment, the White House did not quite realise that the entire group of Republicans - and not just the right-wing extremist group opposed to Clinton from the first days of his presidency - was so determined. The White House had been banking on a group of between 12 and 20 moderate Republican lawmakers and had been hopeful of either warding off the impeachment move or using pressure from the moderates to hammer out a 'deal' before a vote on the floor of the House. Their optimism had its basis in the fact that this was, after all, the holiday season. However, the Republicans made it amply clear that they would forgive and love anybody except Clinton.

What the White House did not understand was that any chance of a 'deal' with the Republicans had faded the moment Clinton's answers to 81 questions posed by the House Judiciary Committee arrived. Conservatives in the Judiciary Committee decided that day to press ahead with the impeachment vote; if an unofficial whip had to be issued, the Republican Party leadership was prepared for it if, for the record, it was going to be a 'conscience vote'. The Republicans expected that Clinton could resort to the same evasiveness and legal and linguistic jugglery that had got him into trouble in the first place.

If the Democrats were keen on high drama prior to the impeachment vote, it was not on account of any love for Clinton. It was because the Democrats in the House had nothing to lose and had everything to gain from such theatrics, including a walkout from the Chamber when their Motion to Recommit failed. Besides, individual leaders in the House, such as Richard Gephardt, had their own agendas to push through. Gephardt is seen as a possible contender for the Democratic ticket for the presidential election in 2000.

In the end, Clinton was nailed for Articles 1 and 3 (perjury and obstruction of justice), while Articles 2 and 4 (perjury in the Paula Jones deposition and abuse of power) were tossed out. However, the damage had been done and no action in the Senate or elsewhere can erase it from the history books. Clinton wanted to be remembered for his contribution to social, economic and political policies. Instead, he is going to be remembered for l'affaire Monica Lewinsky and for putting in motion a thoughtless process of deception leading up to his impeachment.

TWO things stood out in the entire drama. First, the brilliant White House strategy of portraying the President as a person who had committed nothing more than a personal sin, for which he was being lynched by a vengeful Republican mob. The second was the naivete of the Grand Old Party in thinking that American public memory is so short that it (the Republican Party) will be spared in the congressional and presidential elections in 2000.

The fact that nearly 65 per cent of the American public did not favour the continuance of the impeachment process was ignored by a group of people who appeared to be blissfully ignorant of the ground realities. In the final analysis, it does not matter that more than 80 per cent of the American people believed that Clinton did lie under oath. The fact of the matter is that with the country's economy doing well, the people do not want to rock the boat and were prepared to look the other way. Whether the bar has been permanently lowered for all Presidents and presidential candidates, however, remains to be seen.

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/ AP
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (right) presents the articles of impeachment to Secretary of the Senate Gary Sisco on December 19 on Capitol Hill, as other Judiciary Committee members look on.

The brilliance of the White House strategy came across not only in its portrayal of the President's injured innocence; it (the White House) has come to believe that somehow the President has been vindicated and that given one more chance his team of lawyers and legal aides could succeed in doing a "job" with the facts in the Senate at the time of the trial and perhaps take a shot at the legal system once more before that. One line of thinking is that Clinton could challenge the legality of a lame-duck House of Representatives impeaching him - a line of thought seasoned Democrats shudder over. They are apprehensive about an over-confident White House going overboard and making things difficult for those people who genuinely wish to see the President get out of the mess he is solely responsible for getting into in the first place.

The White House is obviously functioning in accordance with a three-fold plan - continue to attack the Repub- licans, terming them a vicious lot; prepare for the legal defence of the President in the Senate; and try to see if there is the possibility of a 'deal' emerging. Although a censure compromise is spoken about, it is fraught with problems. But it is not altogether a hopeless situation. Two former Presidents - Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford - and one former Senate majority leader and a respected Republican, Robert Dole, have put forward some suggestions. Some very preliminary contacts have been made in the Senate.

One suggestion is that in order to be acceptable to the Senators, the censure motion has to be a tough one. No way should it look as if Clinton is doing a favour by accepting a censure motion with a view to ending a traumatic phase in the U.S. political process. In fact, one of the reasons why so many people call for a censure motion is not because the prosecution is weak but because there is no chance of a conviction getting two-thirds majority support in the Senate, at least for now. A trial in the Senate may drag on for months and cripple the political and legislative processes. It will be a circus all over again unless the Senators unanimously agree to a change of rules and hold some trial sessions behind 'closed' doors.

The real problem with a censure motion lies in the requirement that Clinton should accept that he lied under oath. The President has continued to maintain adamantly that he did no such thing. His advisors are telling him to resist this. However, this is perhaps a bargaining ploy. The trade-off for such an admission would be a 'deal' under which the President will be assured that there will be no legal action for the statements he makes, upon leaving office in 2001.

A meaningful solution can be arrived at only if serious people carry out the negotiations. The White House has been warned that it will be landing itself in deep trouble if it takes things for granted and tries to up the ante by second-guessing the Senators. Many of Clinton's advisors are politically smart enough to realise that proceedings in the Senate are a much different ball game compared to the House of Representatives and that the lawmakers there generally take a long-range perspective.

To argue that Clinton can always depend on the support of the Democrats and therefore can never be impeached would be stretching things a bit. The same goes for the impression that the White House legal team and the President's personal lawyers are simply raring to go after the so-called witnesses, including Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. The risk involved in all this is that an emotional testimony by Monica Lewinsky could spell trouble for the White House; if public opinion begins to swing the other way, there is no telling what will happen to the "support" in the Senate.

THE year 1998 has undoubtedly been a tumultuous one for U.S. politics. At no time in recent history has there been so much mud-slinging and viciousness. Some people describe it as ideological politics that has descended to low levels; some others call it the politics of the inevitable, when two major parties confront each other in the absence of real policy challenges. But the real question is for how long the American people will have to endure it.