With his stewardship of impeachment hearings increasingly under fire, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde announced Wednesday that the committee could vote on articles of impeachment against President Clinton by the end of next week.
Under the schedule, lawyers for the president would present their defense Tuesday, followed by a summary of the case against Clinton on Wednesday by Republican counsel David Schippers as a final prelude to an impeachment vote.
Praised widely only months ago by many Democrats as a judicious elder who could steer the inquiry to some commendable conclusion, Hyde (R-Ill.) is now under intense criticism for his decision to expand the investigation into possible criminal violations of campaign finance laws by the president.
“I think it’s chaos,” said Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), the Democratic leader in the House. “. . . I think no one is in charge. The present speaker (Newt Gingrich) is not exerting leadership. The speaker-to-be (Bob Livingston) is not exerting leadership. And Henry Hyde seems to be giving in to some members on the committee.”
White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said Republican leaders were abdicating their responsibility by leaving the matter entirely to Hyde.
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“It’s obviously an odd situation where you have the Congress undertaking the most grave responsibility they have short of declaring war and the leadership saying that they don’t want anything to do with it,” Lockhart said.
Expansion of the inquiry received a boost Wednesday when a federal judge granted a request by the committee to allow investigators to review controversial internal Justice Department memos, written by FBI Director Louis Freeh and prosecutor Charles LaBella.
Some have suggested to committee Republicans that the memos implicate the president in fundraising wrongdoing.
U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson allowed the investigators to review the memos and take notes, but not make copies of them. The investigators may report the contents only to Hyde and Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the committee.
Defending the GOP leadership Wednesday, Sam Stratman, Hyde’s spokesman, said, “The pattern that many Democrats have used–including now the minority leader–is to throw up specious claims of partisanship.
“We received credible information of criminal wrongdoing from Justice Department officials. We’re very confident in the credibility of these individuals,” Stratman said. “We must be about the task of putting together a credible factual record.”
The White House on Wednesday accepted the Judiciary Committee’s invitation to make a defense in the inquiry, but demanded access to the fundraising memos and other material concerning the charges relating to former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and Kathleen Willey, a former White House volunteer who has accused Clinton of making a sexual advance toward her.
“We will of course accept your invitation to appear before the committee and to present a defense on behalf of the president,” White House lawyers Gregory Craig and Charles F.C. Ruff wrote in a letter to Hyde. “Once we have reviewed the material, we will be prepared to present a vigorous defense of the president.”
The committee seems to be hurtling toward a party-line vote next week of at least one, and possibly several, articles of impeachment, possibly without even taking a vote on the idea of a lesser punishment such as censure. The committee is considering separate articles of impeachment for perjury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and abuse of power.
“In essence, we had the prosecutor’s opening argument and now the case is going to the jury,” said Rep. Thomas Barrett (D-Wis.), a Judiciary Committee member.
Barrett said the committee, despite several months consumed by the impeachment process, had failed to unearth any new facts related to the president’s conduct. Rather, he said, Republicans are set on ratifying the accusations contained in the referral sent to the House by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.
Barrett said he had naively thought that each lawmaker would sit and pass judgment like a grand juror in a criminal case.
“It didn’t take long to burst that bubble,” he said. “It hasn’t been something that I think any of us are particularly proud of.”
Hyde repeatedly said at the outset of the formal inquiry that for the American people to see the process as credible, it had to be bipartisan.
His only political success in that regard, Barrett said, is that “he’s held the Republicans together. If the plan has been to move forward on a partisan basis, he’s done that quite well.”
Even some Republicans said they are perplexed by the direction of the committee.
“I can’t guess where they are going with this unless they know something that the rest of us don’t,” said one aide to the House GOP leadership. “I know that people are saying it’s inexplicable, that they’ve gone crazy. I can’t say that; I just don’t know what they are doing. I could understand continuing this fight if they had something. It seems to be spiraling out of control without an end game.”
John Pitney, a professor of political science at Claremont McKenna College who studies Congress, said, “They are searching for a silver bullet and if they don’t find it pretty soon, the Wolfman is going to live.
“If they don’t find something new, it’s just going to get them deeper in trouble. It will expose them to the charge that they are grasping for any possible charge to throw at Clinton rather than searching for the truth.”
Some Republicans have turned to assessing where GOP members’s views are on impeachment.
Grover Norquist, a conservative activist who is a close adviser to the Republican leadership, said GOP vote-counters met Wednesday to assess the chances of passing an impeachment resolution through the House.
“The votes are there” on an impeachment resolution based on allegations that the president committed perjury, Norquist asserted.
Yet Dan Schnur, a Republican political consultant based in California, said the committee has failed to craft a strategy to build public support for its actions.
Schnur and other Republicans also said the committee has failed to adequately explain to the public the nature and meaning of impeachment because most Americans seem to equate it with removal from office as opposed to a formal set of charges to be tried in the Senate.
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“Most people look at impeachment as a sentence as opposed to an indictment,” he said.
Republican consultant Ed Gillespie shared the view that Americans don’t understand the real meaning of impeachment, but he also said Hyde could not avoid looking at the campaign finance memos.
“They were told these memos contained evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the president,” he said. “You can’t ignore that. You are compelled.”
“They (committee Republicans) are in a box. They are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. You can’t not move forward having amassed all this evidence and testimony, credible evidence clearly of perjury, just because polls indicate the majority doesn’t want to go forward. There is a constitutional responsibility here.”