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To: HairBall who wrote (54808)	10/6/1998 8:11:00 PM
From: Saulamanca	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 58727

LG, don't know if you saw this. To Save the Party, Democrats Must Vote to Impeach Wall Street Journal October 6, 1998 JEROME M. ZEIFMAN As a lifelong Democrat and chief counsel of the House Judiciary Committee at the time of the Nixon impeachment inquiry, I believe I have a personal responsibility to speak out about the current impeachment crisis. And I believe my fellow Democrats on today's Judiciary Committee have a moral, ethical and constitutional responsibility to vote to impeach President Clinton. The positions taken by the president and his die-hard Democratic defenders in Congress and the media are indefensible. We are living in dangerous times. I believe the president has personally brought his office into scandal and disrepute. He has lied repeatedly to the American people, has lied under oath in the Paula Jones case, has committed perjury several times before a criminal grand jury. He has also lied to his own cabinet members and has apparently lied even to his own lawyers. Without asserting his Fifth Amendment privilege, he has directly refused to answer appropriate questions from grand jurors--an offense for which any other American would be held in contempt of court and jailed until he replied. To date the only defense taken by the White House and the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee is to take the offensive. They are attacking Kenneth Starr, arguing in the media that he has abused his legal authority. They have also declared "war" on Congress itself by charging Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde and House Republicans with partisanship and "unfairness." Contrary to all impeachment precedents in both American and English history, they argue that even if the president has committed perjury--a felony--it is not an impeachable offense. If Mr. Starr has abused his authority--and I don't believe he has--the appropriate remedy is to bring a motion before Judge Norma Holloway Johnson, a Carter appointee, to punish Mr. Starr. I have personally brought a major case before Judge Johnson on behalf of 22 AFL-CIO unions and consider her to be a jurist beyond reproach. As for the "fairness" of congressional procedures, I recall vividly that at the time we began our impeachment inquiry of Richard Nixon, I was summoned by Speaker Carl Albert to his office to confer privately with him, House Parliamentarian Lewis Deschler and Majority Leader Tip O'Neill. I was asked: "What, if any, special procedural rules do you recommend we adopt for the impeachment inquiry?" I had already spent months researching impeachment precedents and procedures and had prepared an official Judiciary Committee report, soon published in book form by the Government Printing Office. No member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, took issue with the accuracy or fairness of my book. My recommendation was that we not attempt to modify any of the rules of the House. To do so would raise the issue of fairness. "It would be like changing the rules of baseball just before the opening of a World Series," I said then. Albert, O'Neill and Deschler agreed with me--and the four of us passed our unanimous recommendations on to Judiciary Chairman Peter Rodino and the House Democrats as well as the Republicans. At the time of Watergate there were some Democrats, including Mr. Rodino, who favored amending the House rules. They attempted to deny Nixon representation by counsel, were opposed to holding hearings with live witnesses, and wanted to prolong an impeachment vote for as long as possible for partisan political purposes. Eventually a bipartisan coalition prevailed and took control of the proceedings away from Mr. Rodino. History is now repeating itself in reverse. Almost a quarter century ago a Republican president took the offensive and accused the House Judiciary Committee and the Democratic-controlled Congress of "wallowing in Watergate" for partisan purposes. Today, Mr. Clinton's Democratic defenders are declaring all-out "war" on the Republican Congress and giving it no credit whatever for helping to balance the budget and improve the economy. Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are arguing that special new rules should be adopted regarding impeachment procedures--and that the traditional rules and impeachment precedents we relied on at the time of Watergate are not applicable to Mr. Clinton. Having long championed traditional Democratic causes, I simply cannot accept Mr. Clinton's own shameless defense and his supporters' offensive attacks on Congress and its traditional rules. Like most traditional Democrats--like most Americans--I have grave reservations about Mr. Clinton's morality and ethics. In my view there is now more than substantial evidence to consider our president a felon who has committed impeachable offenses. I believe that Democrats should--and eventually some will--vote to impeach Mr. Clinton, who has betrayed the trust of both the country and the Democratic Party. Mr. Zeifman, a retired lawyer in Newtown, Conn., was chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee at the time of the Nixon impeachment inquiry. He is author of "Without Honor: The Impeachment of President Nixon and the Crimes of Camelot" (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1996). Copyright © 1998 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.