Why was President Clinton Impeached?

The Impeachment concerned two basic charges. That “the President provided perjurious, false, and misleading testimony to the grand jury regarding the Paula Jones case and his relationship with Monica Lewinsky,” and, “the president obstructed justice in an effort to delay, impede, cover up and conceal the existence of evidence related to the Jones case.” According to the Impeachment document, by doing this, “William Jefferson Clinton has undermined the integrity of his office, has brought disrepute on the Presidency, has betrayed his trust as President, and has acted in a manner subversive of the rule of law and justice, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”

Clearly, the weight of evidence proves Clinton was guilty. The problem is, was he guilty enough? Did his actions meet the Constitutional obligation that Presidents be removed only for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors?” The first two requirements are clear enough, based on the evidence, Clinton is innocent of the treason and bribery aspects. This leaves the last or the “catch all” requirement. The question comes down to the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors. While the first two aspects are easy to define and understand, the third is a matter of judgment. It is significant that the Framers put the power to impeach into the hands of the legislative branch, rather than the judicial branch. This allows Congress to exercise its judgement on whether the offense warrants impeachment. While the judicial branch is somewhat constrained in its action by legal precedents, the legislative branch is not so fettered. As Gerald Ford said during the Nixon Watergate hearings, the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors is, “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

Based on Ford’s definition, Clinton was clearly guilty and should have been impeached. However, it would be easier to believe in the correctness of the impeachment option if the motives of Starr and the Congressional representatives calling for Clinton’s impeachment were pure and could not be impugned. The length of Starr’s investigation worries some. Starr took over the Whitewater investigation was in 1994. By 1997, he still had no concrete evidence that the Clintons were guilty of anything. It was then he asked for and received permission to widen his investigation and look into Jones’ civil accusations and the rumors of Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky. The case could be made that Star was so obsessed with getting “something” on Clinton, that he used the Lewinsky affair (something that many people regarded as a private matter between President and Mrs. Clinton) and Clinton’s maneuvering during the Jones civil trial to accomplish what a lengthy investigation into a legitimate abuse of power could not. In short, he made wrongdoing which could be handled effectively in a civil court after Clinton had left office into a question of presidential wrongdoing. The opposite could also be true, however, namely, that the Clintons had effectively covered their tracks on the Whitewater scandal and Starr attacked the only avenue available to him (Clinton’s sloppy handling of his extramarital affairs). The result is a draw. Starr was either on a witch-hunt or was a dedicated government servant who made the most of what was handed him.

A review of the Congressional roll call on the impeachment doesn’t help. The results at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/housevote/all.htm reveal the votes for impeachment were mainly split along party lines. A review of the Senate votes for impeachment ( http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/02/12/senate.vote/ ) reveals the same thing. Despite a few anomalies, Congress voted for or against the impeachment largely by party affiliation. For the most part Democrats (who had a stake in keeping a Democrat in the White House) voted against impeachment and the Republicans (who had a stake in embarrassing the Democratic Party in order to clear the way for a Republican White House in 2000) voted for impeachment. Again this is a draw, one either accepts that the -insert political party- stood for (or against) legitimate exercise of Congress’ Constitutional power or (aside from showing the crying need for a legitimate third party), the Impeachment was more an exercise in political maneuvering than any real concern for a presidential abuse of power.

Ultimately, the question must be answered by the results. The entire Impeachment process really accomplished very little. All it seemed to accomplish was to make minor celebrities of a few people, further divide a country, and distract our attention from more important matters. Clinton was wrong. He was an arrogant man who used and callously discarded a young woman, paying her off as he had a string of other women. Lewinsky and Jones were also not free from censure. Both used their sex to attempt to get what they wanted and when they felt they weren’t being compensated enough ran to (in Jones’ case) or threatened to (in Lewinsky’s case) the media and cried “Rape.” Rather than long and involved Senate hearings and an increasingly innocuous Impeachment process, the whole matter could have been handled with a Congressional censure and civil proceedings against Clinton once he had finished his term. It is left for the reader to determine whether the Impeachment was a necessary way for Congress to express its displeasure or merely a distraction from more important events.