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

To: pezz who wrote (31538)	2/2/1999 10:10:00 AM
From: Bill	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 67261

Dems triumph over the Constitution by Don Feder Tuesday, February 2, 1999 We knew almost from the outset that Bill Clinton has no moral compass. What we didn't know was just how far his party would go to protect him from the consequences of his criminal conduct. Whatever the future holds for Democrats, this will stand to their everlasting shame. Can this be the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, of gutsy Harry Truman (who took the heat and knew exactly where the buck stopped), of Hubert Humphrey, who defied public opinion of his day by calling for equal rights for all Americans on the floor of the 1948 Democratic National Convention? Is this the party of Sen. Sam Ervin, tenacious in his defense of the Constitution against another president who thought himself above the law? Last week, a solitary Democratic senator (Russell Feingold, a maverick from Wisconsin) voted with the solid Republican majority against dismissal and in favor of calling a short list of witnesses. The best that the party has to offer stood by their felon. Connecticut's Joe Lieberman, he of the pious pronouncements on the president's disgraceful conduct, New York's Daniel Patrick Moynihan (once dubbed the conscience of the Senate) and West Virginia's Robert Byrd (fair-weather friend of the Constitution) all voted to dismiss the case. Byrd even offered the resolution. But, mark this well, not a single Republican defected. Liberals like Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), John Chaffee (R.I.) and James Jeffords (Vt.), who rarely side with their party's majority on any issue, cast their lot with Jesse Helms and John Ashcroft. Even if they're out of sync with the Republican philosophy, GOP moderates know what's at stake here: the integrity of our system of government. This refutes the latest White House spin - that by pushing the case against Clinton, congressional Republicans are kowtowing to their party's right-wing base. When was the last time Olympia Snowe took her marching orders from Gary Bauer? Or John Warner from the Christian Coalition? But at every stage of the process, Democrats have been a rigged jury. In 1974, all but four House Republicans voted in favor of a ''resolution of inquiry'' into Watergate. In 1998, only 31 House Democrats approved a similarly open-ended inquiry of Clinton's criminal misconduct. Following a debate in which they carried on like temperamental tots (actually whining because the majority would not allow a vote on a resolution of censure, as meaningless as it was unconstitutional), with the exception of five brave souls, Democratic representatives voted against the articles of impeachment, then scurried to the White House to applaud the vice president when he called the perjurer in chief one of our ''greatest presidents.'' After taking an oath to fairly consider the evidence and reach an impartial verdict, Democratic senators immediately betrayed it by opposing a real trial. Two days of abbreviated presentations followed by a vote on adjournment was their preferred scenario. It took the Democrats decades to arrive here, to reach the point where they would gleefully shred the Constitution to save their president. This is no longer the Jeffersonian party of limited government, but the party of $1.77 trillion federal budgets and the highest level of taxation in our history. Democrats are willing to ignore perjury, to wink at obstruction of justice, to tolerate the nation's chief law enforcement officer actively working to subvert our legal system. Having dealt representative government a thousand blows in this century, the Democrats' triumph over the Constitution is now complete. bostonherald.com