The Senate trial of the president of the United States is beginning and the nation is in an uproar–over the blown fumble call in the Jan. 3 NFL playoff game. In all of history, has a head of state ever been put on trial with so little popular agitation? (Barbra Streisand standing on a soapbox on Wilshire Boulevard does not qualify as popular agitation.)
Yet beneath the surreal placidity and general unconcern something important is happening. As usual, Irving Kristol said it best: “The Republicans are committing political suicide. The Democrats are committing moral suicide.”
Republicans are taking a serious political risk trying to remove a president who enjoys a 73 percent popularity rating. But it is no free ride for the Democrats either. In the long run, they will suffer if they do nothing but acquit a man that the vast majority of Americans know deceived the country, mocked his associates, perjured himself and dishonored his office.
What to do then? Of all the bad alternatives, the Slade Gorton-Joe Lieberman plan, shot down from right and left, was the least bad: a five-day trial, with evidence presented, questions submitted (by senators to the chief justice presiding), and a test vote on whether, if the charges made by the House were true, the president should be removed from office.
Gorton-Lieberman failed because too many senators–Republicans mainly–wanted an actual, not a test vote, on the president’s guilt or innocence. Democrats, on the other hand, demanded a trial with no witnesses, an odd request given both the gravity of the case and eight centuries of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudential precedent. And they threatened to either halt or disrupt the trial with endless procedural votes if they didn’t get it.
The best compromise, therefore, is a truncated but real trial with the House Republicans agreeing to a very short witness list and very limited parameters for their testimony, merely buttressing the existing record rather than expanding on it. (Expanding it means opening new doors into Bill Clinton’s interior life.)
This procedure will allow the Republicans a chance for the least politically damaging outcome: a final vote on Clinton’s guilt that garners at least 51 votes for conviction. With a majority of both houses of Congress finding Clinton unworthy of retaining his office, it will be impossible for the president and his acolytes to claim vindication simply because the constitutional hurdle of a two-thirds majority had not been met.
What about censure? Reflecting the view of many Republicans, Sen. Gorton frankly does not give a damn. Censure is the Democrats’ problem. Whereas a quick trial and decent vote for conviction might save the Republicans’ hide, it will take censure to save the Democrats’.
The vast majority of Democratic senators will vote to acquit the president. Most do not want to leave it at that. To salvage some honor from this, they would need to establish that while they would not remove the president, they will not vindicate him either. Hence the need for censure.
Senate Democrats would not want to follow the ridiculous example of their Democratic House colleagues, who, after saying how ardently they wished to rebuke the president for dishonoring his office, trooped up Pennsylvania Avenue to cheer their newly impeached chief at that disgraceful White House pep rally.
The problem for Senate Democrats is that so many of them feel the need to negotiate the language of a censure resolution with the White House. Some Democratic senators seem to think that the only way to make censure real and official is to pass a bill, meaning a resolution passed by House and Senate and signed by the president (or, at least, not vetoed by him).
More Top Picks Best Laminators For Home Offices
Why? That allows the president to dilute the language of the censure and to avoid the heart of the matter, which is establishing for the record, in Congress assembled, that the president did indeed lie under oath. The president will not admit that, obvious as it is. What exactly has Clinton done for Senate Democrats–other than enmesh them in his own dishonor–to earn their allegiance to him on this matter?
The way out of this jungle is clear: An abbreviated trial ending with a vote on Clinton’s removal. Then a censure resolution crafted by the Democrats, without editing by the disgraced president, passed with the grudging support of a few Republicans.
End of story.