I don't believe the Globe can be considered part of the VRWC.
Here's a selected piece from this morning's edition:
The Boston Globe Online
News Analysis
Clinton's 15 minutes of shame
boston.com
By David M. Shribman, Globe Staff, 12/12/98
WASHINGTON - In an extraordinary 15-minute period yesterday, all of
the maneuvering, solemnity, drama, and historic high stakes of Bill
Clinton's disgrace and defense were on full display.
It began with the president of the United States, standing in the Rose Garden
in the thickening dusk of a December afternoon, expressing his shame and his
sorrow - and showing, for the first time in public, the fear of more humiliation
to come.
It ended with the solemn drumbeat of yeas and nays - single syllables uttered
in conscience and headed for history - in the very same paneled committee
chamber where Richard M. Nixon's impeachment resolutions were passed a
quarter-century ago.
Washington finally had its 15 minutes of infamy, but still the questions lingered
in the chilly air of the capital.
Was it enough for Clinton to express his sorrow, admit his deceit, speak of his
''wrongful conduct,'' and allude to his pain, or would it appear like a deathbed
conversion, a desperate gambit designed to sway the few Republican
moderates who - nervously, portentously, but undeniably - hold his destiny in
their hands?
And will the House now press ahead to impeach the president on a party-line
vote, freed to do so by its assumption that the Senate, with its 55-45
Republican majority, does not contain 67 lawmakers who are willing to remove
Clinton from office?
With six days until the House meets for the first time in 130 years to take up
presidential impeachment - Nixon resigned in August 1974 rather than be
impeached - the events of the late afternoon crystallized the Washington
struggle.
Yesterday President Clinton again acknowledged his misdeeds, apologized for
them, expressed his sorrow, and repeated his determination to press on - all in
one statement. New was his willingness to accept punishment. Yesterday the
House Judiciary Committee sent impeachment resolutions to the floor and set
up a debate and vote that, in turn, could put the president on trial in the Senate.
The two events bracketing that remarkable quarter-hour displayed, as no other
events in this 11-month-old melodrama have, the enormous pressures, weighty
considerations, and historic implications of an episode that began as an office
affair and ended up as an affair of state.
The president, accustomed to speaking from strength, appealed to the
Congress and the public from weaknesses human and political: The human
weakness that drew him into a reckless relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky.
The human weakness that caused him to dissemble and, as he put it yesterday,
give in to his shame. And the political weakness that forced him to seek
forgiveness and mercy from a Republican Congress that now makes
impeachment seem possible, even likely.
His audience was not the House Judiciary Committee members who, only
minutes later, pressed ahead with their resolution of impeachment; their
determination to do so was well known and widely expected. His audience
was, instead, the American people, who oppose impeachment and might yet
persuade their representatives to turn away from it, and Republican
moderates, the elusive and critical factor in next week's House voting.
That the president made his remarks yesterday was itself a measure of the
president's weakness. White House officials were growing worried that if he
waited until he returned from the Middle East early next week, many of those
moderates might already have committed themselves publicly to vote for
impeachment.
Even as the House Judiciary Committee was preparing for its fateful vote on
the first article of impeachment, Clinton was seeking to change the debate,
saying for the first time that he was ''prepared to accept'' a rebuke and
censure from the House, the body that the founders intended to be the voice
of the American people.
But in saying that he would accept what had never been done before, the
president was in fact campaigning for censure. The Senate's censure of
Andrew Jackson in 1834 and the House's censure of James Buchanan in 1862
were not, in an expression that has new meaning in the 1990s, consensual.
Representative Barney Frank, the Newton Democrat who was reprimanded
by the House in 1990 for a sex-related incident, has argued that congressional
condemnation was ''no triviality.'' But, by any measure, censure is far less
demeaning than impeachment.
A report prepared this fall for House members by the Congressional Research
Service notes that censure might have political or historical implications but
that it has ''no particular legal or constitutional consequence.'' The Constitution
makes no provision for congressional censure of the president, but the
Congress is free to pass any nonbinding resolution it likes without fear of it
being overturned by the courts.
''We vote for our honor, which is the only thing we get to take with us to the
grave,'' Judiciary Committee chairman Henry J. Hyde of Illinois said as the
proceedings began yesterday morning. Then, in the extraordinary 15 minutes
of yesterday afternoon, the difference in the ways the principals view the
impeachment question - indeed, the difference in the ways they view honor -
was made plain. (emphasis mine-jim)
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 12/12/98.
© Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company. |
