The moral authority of the presidency is now lower than
at the time of Watergate. Many Democrats now have a double
standard -- refusing to apply the same constitutional principles
to Clinton that we applied to Nixon in 1974.
. . . . At the same time Clinton's defenders are charging the
Republicans with unfairness and prejudgment. Yet the truth is
that even before we began any impeachment inquiry in 1973,
84 Democrats introduced actual impeachment resolutions on
the House floor. In contrast, to date no Republican has
introduced such a resolution. Instead the Republicans simply
have called for an inquiry.
. . . . None of us can be certain how history will regard the
present crisis. Yet, it seems likely to me that our descendants
will regard President Clinton as the most morally flawed
president in our history -- and our Democratic Party of 1998
as afflicted by the deadly sin of hypocrisy.
Heavy helping of sanity from Dem lead Watergate counsel:
The Democrats'
Double Standard
By Jerry Zeifman
Money, the mother's milk of politics, also is the root of
evil in the Democratic Party/Clinton-Gore
campaign-finance labyrinth, according to a report just
released by the House.
As a lifelong Democrat, I am saddened by the position
being taken by my own party. I am especially concerned
that President Clinton and his defenders are promulgating
disinformation about Watergate, the law and the meaning of the
phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors."
. . . . Democratic politicians, attorneys and law professors now
openly acknowledge that the president has:
. . . . * lied to the American people for more than seven
months;
. . . . * lied under oath in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment
lawsuit and before a criminal grand jury;
. . . . * and apparently even lied to his own lawyer.
. . . . Clinton's defenders now argue correctly that a "high crime
or misdemeanor" need not be a felony -- and that there may be
some felonies that are not impeachable offenses. As a scholar
of the Constitution's impeachment clause for the last 25 years I
also agree with that. But in my view many of my fellow
Democrats now are sullying the Constitution by arguing that the
commission of perjury by the president -- even if proved
beyond a reasonable doubt -- does not rise to the level of an
impeachable high crime or misdemeanor.
. . . . The current argument of Clinton's defenders is that even if
the president is a felon who committed perjury and lied about
oral sex in the oval office, it is not impeachable because he
perjured himself only to cover up purely personal sexual
matters. In support of this argument -- using what is the most
effective federally funded political-propaganda machine in our
history -- some Democrats now are promulgating outright lies
about the true history of the House Judiciary Committee's
impeachment proceedings in 1974.
. . . . Attempting to rewrite the history of the Rep. Peter
Rodino panel (to which I was chief counsel) defenders of
President Clinton now cite the fact that in 1974 a majority of
the House Judiciary Committee voted down an article of
impeachment charging Nixon with tax evasion (a criminal
offense). Democrats now are dissembling the truth by arguing
that the committee concluded that his income-tax return was
completely a "personal" matter and therefore was not
impeachable.
. . . . The truth is that before our vote the House Ways and
Means Committee had audited Nixon's tax return and reported
that the return showed Nixon had improperly taken a tax
deduction for donating his personal papers. But they found no
evidence that Nixon had knowingly, under penalty of perjury,
failed to file an honest tax return.
. . . . It simply is not true that the vote to reject the income-tax
article was based on a determination that the filing of a false
income-tax return was purely a "personal" matter, and
therefore not impeachable. The truth is that neither the House
Judiciary Committee members nor my staff had found any
substantial evidence that President Nixon had committed
income-tax evasion, which is a felony. If he had in fact
knowingly committed tax fraud, a crime against the state, there
would be no basis for considering it a purely personal matter.
. . . . As for the question of the personal accountability of the
president, his defenders -- including even some Democrats
who participated in the Nixon impeachment proceedings --
now are intentionally misleading the present generation of
Americans with still other disinformation regarding the true
history of the Rodino committee's Nixon-impeachment
proceedings.
. . . . In the summer of 1972 a group of burglars was arrested
for breaking into the Watergate headquarters of the
Democratic National Committee. Their presumed purpose was
to gather political intelligence of value to the reelection
campaign of President Nixon. All had ties either to the Nixon
White House, the CIA or FBI. We were later to learn that
most of the burglars, including Howard Hunt, had a history of
illegal CIA-sponsored activities that dated back to prior
presidencies and were committed in the name of national
security -- a fact that was not made known to the public until
after Nixon resigned from office rather than face impeachment
by the full House of Representatives.
. . . . In the summer of 1974, preparing for the televised
impeachment proceedings of the House Judiciary Committee,
then-Chairman Rodino asked me to write a statement for him
to open the debate. The statement that I wrote was a reflection
of a political and legal strategy that was agreed upon at
meetings of the committee's Democratic caucus -- which were
held in my office.
. . . . In framing the issues to be resolved by Congress, the
statement that I drafted -- and which Rodino eloquently
delivered -- drew on a quotation from the British conservative
Edmund Burke. In the House of Commons Burke successfully
impeached mad King George III's minister, Warren Hastings,
the governor-general of the East India Co. Burke had not
impeached Hastings for the commission of a statutory crime but
for acts of political corruption that offended the "morality"
standards of England.
. . . . With the Hastings impeachment still pending in the House
of Lords, while our founders were drafting the impeachment
clause of our Constitution, Burke's morality standard was
translated into American jurisprudence in the form of the
"Madisonian" standard -- which does not require proof of a
statutory crime.
. . . . In opening the impeachment proceedings against Nixon,
Rodino invoked the words of Burke: "It is by [impeachment
process] that statesmen who abuse their power are accused by
statesmen, and tried by statesmen, not upon the niceties of a
narrow jurisprudence, but upon the enlarged and solid
principles of state morality."
. . . . Thus, Rodino made it clear that the core of the
Democrats' impeachment charge against Nixon was that Nixon
had failed to meet the moral standards that are expected of
those who hold high office in a democratic society.
. . . . In the summer of 1974, the Rodino committee adopted
three articles of impeachment (which I had helped committee
members to draft.) The core of all of Nixon's impeachable
offenses was not that he had personally committed a felony.
Instead, we charged him with violating his oath of office by
failing to execute the laws of the United States. We also
charged him with lying to the American people -- even though
he had never lied under oath before a court. Similarly, prior to
President Clinton, no president in our history had been charged
with lying under oath.
. . . . The truth is that none of the articles charged Nixon
personally with any advanced knowledge of either the
Watergate break-in or with either directing or having advance
knowledge of any of the illegal activities of the FBI, CIA or
IRS. Indeed, we then had no evidence that President Nixon
had directed or had advance knowledge of any felonies
committed by any of his subordinates. Instead, we charged
Nixon with being accountable for acts of his subordinates that
he had not even known about when they were committed.
. . . . Contrary to the disinformation currently being
promulgated by Clinton's defenders, it was not until after we
voted out articles of impeachment that we learned for the first
time that there was "smoking-gun" evidence that President
Nixon had in fact personally committed a felony. This occurred
after our impeachment vote when, in United States v. Nixon,
the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the
subpoenaed White House tapes, including the so-called
"smoking gun" tape.
. . . . The tape revealed that Nixon personally had directed his
chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, to press the FBI and CIA to help
in the cover-up of Watergate. After the disclosure even the
president's most stalwart Republican defenders agreed to
change their votes and support an article of impeachment.
. . . . There now are striking differences between Watergate
and the current crisis. The cancer on the Nixon presidency
began in the Justice Department and the CIA and spread
upward toward the Oval Office. Today there already is
substantial evidence that Clinton is a felon who has committed
perjury.
. . . . The Clinton cancer on the presidency began in the Oval
Office when the president had sex with an intern. He then used
the powers of his office to cover it up for seven months. The
Clinton cancer has spread from the head down. It now is
endangering both the nation and the Democratic Party.
. . . . The moral authority of the presidency is now lower than
at the time of Watergate. Many Democrats now have a double
standard -- refusing to apply the same constitutional principles
to Clinton that we applied to Nixon in 1974.
. . . . At the same time Clinton's defenders are charging the
Republicans with unfairness and prejudgment. Yet the truth is
that even before we began any impeachment inquiry in 1973,
84 Democrats introduced actual im-peachment resolutions on
the House floor. In contrast, to date no Republican has
introduced such a resolution. Instead the Republicans simply
have called for an inquiry.
. . . . None of us can be certain how history will regard the
present crisis. Yet, it seems likely to me that our descendants
will regard President Clinton as the most morally flawed
president in our history -- and our Democratic Party of 1998
as afflicted by the deadly sin of hypocrisy.
. . . .
Jerry Zeifman was Democrat chief counsel of the House Judiciary
Committee at the time of the Nixon impeachment
proceedings and is a former professor of law at the
University of Santa Clara.
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