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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (8909)	10/10/1998 9:28:00 PM
From: Les H	Respond to of 67261

The long journey to impeachment has started. Where will it end? economist.com HOW quickly the political seasons change. Just a month ago Maryland's Democratic governor, Parris Glendening, was anxious to avoid Bill Clinton (whose Starr-reported misbehaviour, he allegedly felt, was too embarrassing to describe to his teenage son). This week, however, the governor, struggling for re-election on November 3rd, was almost begging for a presidential visit. Mr Clinton, he explained, had expressed the appropriate contrition: now it was time “to rally behind this administration.” In other words, at least for the hard-pressed Mr Glendening, Bill Clinton has somehow managed to transform himself from electoral liability to campaign asset. The question, both for the president and for the country, is how many other Democrats—especially how many Democrats in Congress—will take Mr Glendening's tack. The president could take solace in the strictly partisan 21-16 vote on October 5th by the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives to approve only the third impeachment investigation of a president in the republic's history, but as The Economist went to press the White House spin doctors were pondering how best to brush away the expected Democrat defections in the vote by the full House. One way, of course, is to present the president as, indeed, a president. Last week, Mr Clinton ostentatiously played host at the White House to Israel's Binyamin Netanyahu and the Palestinians' Yasser Arafat. This week, the prolonged posturing by the Judiciary Committee conveniently coincided with the start of the annual meetings in Washington of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, giving Mr Clinton valuable opportunities to appear serious and statesmanlike on issues ranging from the crises of global capital markets to the plight of Kosovo's Albanians. Another way is to assert that the Republicans have terrorised some Democrats into defecting by deliberately exaggerating the gravity of the president's sins. Mr Clinton's loyalists make much of the insistence by the Judiciary Committee's Republican majority that its inquiry should follow the model of the Watergate hearings almost a quarter-century ago, with the committee “authorised and directed to investigate fully and completely”. The president's new press spokesman, Joe Lockhart, commented that the vote was “a culmination of a month-long preconceived political strategy by Republicans in Congress.” Or as John Conyers, the committee's ranking Democrat, protested: “This is not Watergate; it is an extramarital affair. Americans know and want to finish this.” Maybe so, but the Republicans can hardly be blamed for refusing to set limits in time or scope. Although the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, after four years and $40m, has yet to produce any evidence linking the president to other real or alleged scandals, such as Whitewater or the firing of staff in the White House travel office, who knows what a Judiciary Committee fishing expedition might find, especially if it looks into the murky waters of campaign finance? Moreover, the Republicans can make a neat rebuttal of the charge of excessive partisanship. Their chief investigative counsel, David Schippers, is a life-long Democrat, but it is he who has presented 15 grounds for the possible impeachment of the president (four more than Mr Starr did, but without Mr Starr's rather strained charge that some invocations of executive privilege had been an abuse of office). As he introduced his charges, Mr Schippers underlined the president's position as the nation's chief law-enforcement officer: if his lying under oath were tolerated, “the integrity of this country's entire judicial process is fatally compromised, and that process will inevitably collapse.” That is not necessarily a reason for impeachment, however. And it is still unclear what is impeachable, and what is not. As Abbe Lowell, the Democrats' counterpart to Mr Schippers, argued: “If President Nixon's alleged lies to the IRS about his taxes were not grounds for impeachment in 1974, how then are alleged lies about President Clinton's private, sexual relationship with Ms Lewinsky grounds in 1998?” Months will now be spent on answering this, regardless of the outcome of the November elections. The assumption is that the elections will go badly for the Democrats; but it is simplistic to argue that a stronger Republican grip on Congress makes Mr Clinton's dismissal from office more likely. As one senior Republican senator points out, many in the House regard an impeachment vote as “a free ride”, knowing that if the president goes on trial before the Senate he will survive in office because there will be Republicans, as well as Democrats, who agree with Mr Lowell and who would prefer to spare the nation the wrenching experience of a guilty verdict. That analysis seems to support an idea floated last weekend by Gerald Ford, a man who, thanks to the impeachment inquiry into his presidential predecessor, Richard Nixon, has better knowledge than most of the agony involved. Mr Ford, who maintains that Mr Clinton at the very least “has broken faith with those who elected him”, argues that the question “is not whether the President has done wrong, but rather, what is an appropriate form of punishment for his wrongdoing. A simple apology is inadequate, and a fine would trivialise his misconduct by treating it as a mere question of monetary restitution.” Mr Ford's suggestion is that the House should conclude a preliminary inquiry by the end of the year and should then summon the president to appear “not at the rostrum familiar to viewers from moments of triumph” but in the well of its chamber. “Imagine a President receiving not an ovation from the people's representatives, but a harshly worded rebuke as rendered by members of both parties . . . Let it be dignified, honest and, above all, cleansing.” Most Americans, sick of the whole saga, would like this; Mr Clinton, for all the bluster of fighting through to the bitter end, would surely be tempted to accept—just one more act of contrition, why not? But acceptance by the House is another matter. There are Republicans who genuinely believe they have a duty to impeach Mr Clinton, and Democrats who feel they owe Mr Clinton nothing (after all, he has espoused many Republican causes to their past discomfort). Arguably, both camps will be stronger in the next House, with some congressmen claiming their election was a plebiscite in favour of impeachment. In other words, pace Mr Ford, the wrangling could go on for months. Lindsey Graham, a Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said on Monday: “Is this Watergate or ‘Peyton Place'? I don't know.” Unhappily, the baby-boomer generation remembers that “Peyton Place” ran even longer than Watergate.

To: Les H who wrote (8909)	10/10/1998 9:36:00 PM
From: Les H	Respond to of 67261

Can just sex be impeachable? Mona Charen Jewish World Review jewishworldreview.com ACCORDING TO THE DEMOCRATS, Bill Clinton is guilty of nothing more than having an extramarital affair. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., asked whether we wanted to have "prosecutors with unlimited powers, accountable to no one, who will spend millions of dollars investigating a person's personal life, who then haul before grand juries every person of the opposite sex the person has had contact with ... " The Republicans, on the other hand, insist that the president's misconduct has nothing whatever to do with sex but with perjury, obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury. Appearing on "Meet the Press" last week, Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., having been reminded of his own extramarital affair 30 years ago, insisted that the sex was not the issue. Republicans -- even those who have committed sexual sins -- should stop saying that. Of course, the sex is part of the problem -- and not just because it led to the perjury, obstruction and other crimes. To call the president's conduct with Monica Lewinsky "an extramarital affair" is really to grant it a dignity it doesn't merit. The president's defenders have hit the "affair" theme hard, insisting that no historical figure could withstand a searching inquiry into his private life. Why, Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower had affairs, they say, and we would not have wanted them impeached! Well, in the first place, it is by no means clear that Eisenhower ever had an affair with Kay Summersby. Historian Gil Troy, author of "Affairs of State," has written that Ike, while separated from Mamie (and, by the way, saving Western civilization by winning World War II) was clearly fond of his young, vivacious driver. But there is no evidence that a sexual affair ever took place. For Clinton's mouthpieces to assert it as fact is contemptible. Those of low character always seek to defame the virtuous in order to make comparisons with themselves less painful. Such assertions go down smoothly with a nation that has lately been instructed, also without evidence, that Thomas Jefferson used a 13-year-old black slave as a concubine and that Christopher Columbus was a genocidal agent of European colonialism. Roosevelt had an extramarital relationship early in his marriage, while he was serving as assistant secretary of the Navy. He ended the relationship with Lucy Mercer (later Rutherford) at the insistence of his wife and mother. As it turned out, she was with him when he died, in Warm Springs, Ga. -- as was his daughter Anna -- a fact that caused Eleanor Roosevelt great pain in her widowhood. The Roosevelt/Mercer relationship lasted for decades, was between two adults close in age and appears to have been a love affair. That does not justify it morally, but it places it on a plane quite different from the Lewinsky indulgence. For all that the president's men now cry "private matter" about his conduct, there was very little that was private about the affair between Clinton and Lewinsky. Instead, the thing smacked of exhibitionism. They chose to conduct their trysts in or near one of the most public rooms in the world. And they kept the door ajar. Clinton told Lewinsky that this was to allay suspicion. But was it also an invitation to disclosure? Kathleen Willey told the world that when Clinton grabbed her and she protested, "Aren't you worried that someone will come in?" he shrugged it off. These are not the actions of a lover, even an illicit lover. This is the conduct of a profoundly juvenile man giddy at his power and utterly deaf to notions of propriety, honor or decency. He used Lewinsky as a sex toy, unzipping his fly and gesturing for her to service him while he chatted on the telephone -- even, on one occasion, while discussing deploying U.S. troops to Bosnia with a congressman. Surely not even in the '90s can that be called an "affair." The sex, standing alone, was an abuse of office. We don't elect presidents to act as moral exemplars. But we cannot tolerate utter louts either. Clinton's conduct is illustrative of the moral rot that has already done severe damage to the nation. Failing to punish him will only accelerate the decline.

To: Les H who wrote (8909)	10/10/1998 9:39:00 PM
From: Les H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Impeachment standards Thomas Sowell Jewish World Review jewishworldreview.com VERDICTS IN CIVIL LAWSUITS are supposed to be determined by "a preponderance of the evidence." Criminals are to be convicted when their guilt is proved "beyond a reasonable doubt." But what are the standards for impeachment? Cynics may say that it is whatever a majority of those voting choose to use as their standard. But this is too clever by half. At best, it describes instead of analyzing. Using that kind of reasoning, you could say that a verdict in either a civil or a criminal case is whatever a jury chooses to do. But surely no one wants our courts to use that as a standard, which could make miscarriages of justice the norm and appeals to higher courts futile. Since we no longer believe in the divine right of kings, holding office is not a right but a trust. Removal from office is therefore not so much a punishment for an individual as a means of safeguarding the larger society from violations of trust by those who hold power -- now and in the future. Unlike the criminal who is put behind bars, the person who is impeached and then convicted walks away as free as a bird and retains all the rights that everyone else in the society has. In a criminal case, we are talking about the enormous power of the state arrayed against one individual. In impeachment, we are talking about someone who already wields power over the rest of us. It is right that we go to great lengths to make sure that an individual is subject to punishment only after his guilt has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. But we do not require any such stringent standard in a dispute between two sides in a civil lawsuit. There we are content to let the case be decided in favor of whichever side has the preponderance of evidence. When considering whether to remove someone from public office, the power imbalance is very different from that in a criminal case. In impeachment cases, it is the accused who has power and the rest of us who have to be defended against its misuse. It is not just its misuse against us personally that is involved. Power can be misused against the institutions and functions of government, on which the rule of law depends -- and therefore against the freedom and justice to which millions of ordinary citizens are entitled. Some years ago, federal judge Alcee L. Hastings was impeached and removed from the bench by the United States Senate because of corruption charges -- on which he had been acquitted in a court of law. After listening to many hours of the impeachment hearings, I concluded that both the Senate and the jury were right to reach the verdicts they did, even though these verdicts seemed to contradict each other. The preponderance of the evidence suggested that Judge Hastings was corrupt -- but it was not proved beyond any reasonable doubt. After being removed from the bench, Judge Hastings suffered no punishment or loss of his rights. In fact, he exercised his right to run for Congress, where he is a member of the House of Representatives today. If we are going to talk about impeachment seriously -- instead of in spin and sound bites -- then we need to talk about what it actually is. Impeachment simply says that there is enough adverse evidence about someone in power to put that person on trial to determine whether he or she should continue in that particular office. The "presumption of innocence" is a necessary shield against the power of government in a criminal case. But no such arbitrary presumption applies in the other 99 percent of human life. If anything, the presumption is that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens, and of the rule of law on which they and their descendants depend, outweigh any non-existent right of any particular person to hold any particular office. Whether you like or don't like the president, he is not the issue. The United States of America is the issue. Nor does it matter whether you like or don't like Paula Jones. She is one of those ordinary citizens for whom courts of law exist. If she cannot get justice because of perjury, then you cannot get justice because of perjury, if we allow it to be winked at. Impeachment is not a popularity contest. Nor is it a race to see how fast we can get something unpleasant over with. That used to be called "a rush to judgment" -- until very recently, when the spin masters changed their spin.