Bork Rejects Impeachment Tactic Offered by Senate Ally nytimes.com
You seem to be a bit irony impaired tonight, JBL. The Gilbert and Sullivan overtones go along with the Chief Justice's dashing stripes on his robe. Of course, I'm sure you have no appreciation for the irony of the Chief Justice's somewhat dubious testimony under oath a while back either. But on to the other article of the day.
Robert Bork, the one-time Supreme Court nominee whose prickly, conservative pronouncements have made him a beacon for right-leaning politicians and jurists, finds himself in an odd position of late, but not unhappily so.
Bork disagrees with one of his strongest supporters and ideological soulmates, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, on how the impeachment trial of President Clinton should be handled. In so doing, Bork has aligned himself, for the moment at least, with some of the president's supporters.
Hatch said this week that he and some fellow Republicans would like to see a bifurcated vote in the Senate -- that is, one vote declaring that Clinton gave false and misleading testimony and hampered the search for truth about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, and a separate vote adjourning the Senate trial without a verdict.
In that way, Hatch argued in an Op-Ed column on Tuesday in The New York Times, Clinton would be denied the acquittal he seems certain to win in the Senate. Furthermore, Hatch said, "The House's vote to impeach President Clinton will stand as a rebuke forever, and the search for truth will have trumped political expediency."
No, Bork said.
"Orrin Hatch is a friend of mine, so I don't want to sound too harsh," Bork, a former solicitor general and federal appeals court judge said in an interview, good-naturedly describing the senator's idea as constitutionally dubious and unsatisfyingly ambiguous, assertions he made on Monday in an Op-Ed column in The Wall Street Journal. . . .
Sounding for a moment like the Clinton supporter he definitely is not, Bork said Hatch and his Republican colleagues "ought to face up to the fact that they're going to lose." Although Republicans have a 55-45 advantage in the Senate, no one has suggested that Clinton's foes can muster the 67 votes needed to convict and remove him. . . .
Bork argued further, both in an interview and in an Op-Ed column Wednesday in The New York Times, that indicting a president while he is in office would probably be unconstitutional and that bringing him to trial surely would.
Imagine the founding fathers, Bork said. Having spelled out the duties and powers of the president and the sole method for his removal (impeachment and conviction), would they want to see a president brought down by 12 people on a jury?
Another outspoken conservative, William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, said he agreed with Bork, and that he could stand the thought of Clinton's being acquitted. "The judgment of history is left open," Kristol said. "I want to have that argument over the next few years."
I'm sure Neocon will be leading us right into that last one, however much hope springs eternal. Otherwise, it looks like soon the "substantive debate" here will be able to go back to full time Clinton hatred and regurgitation of the long litany of charges the incompetent Starr couldn't come up with any evidence on. No more distraction from that pesky constitutional process. Only 21 months to convince 16 or so percent of the electorate that they're stupid, and the Republicans aren't!
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