An Admirable Sanction Is Cast Into Frivolous Disrepute

How Bill Clinton must have yearned to tell the American people that in the interests of energy conservation and to avoid excessive expense he was offering Saddam Hussein one final warning, in the form of a brisk bombardment of the House Republican Caucus on Capitol Hill. Ever eager to show off the precision of their missiles, the Pentagon chiefs would surely be eager to accept the challenge.

For their part, the Republicans deride the bombardment of Iraq at this juncture as mere distraction and delay, though in the larger scale of things they doubtless have no qualms at the sudden descent of cruise missiles onto Baghdad and its inhabitants.

And here we encounter the whole absurdity of the impeachment process against Clinton. The Republicans would never impeach him for prosecuting an embargo against Iraq that has cost hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. Yet they call for his eviction from office for sexual transactions with Monica Lewinsky and for trying to conceal the fact.

It would be easy to draw up general terms of impeachment. Has Clinton lied to the American people? Of course he has, on great issues of state ranging from welfare reform to the bombings in the Sudan and Afghanistan. Has he perverted the course of justice? Without question. Ask those tens of thousands in prison whose disproportionate sentences for crack possessions he has upheld, against the recommendation of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Ask those thousands on death row whose rights to appeal their cases to federal courts he has amputated with his Effective Death Penalty Act. Has he abused his executive powers? Most assuredly, with his override of such laws as the Endangered Species Act.

Clinton deserves the scrutiny of impeachment, like every other president in my memory. But the articles issued by the House Judiciary Committee plunge an admirable sanction into frivolous disrepute.

The advocates of impeachment speak sternly of the rule of law, averting their eyes from the silly parody of the prosecutorial process that has had Independent Counsel Ken Starr colluding in a manhunt with Paula Jones’ lawyers, perverting the processes of the grand jury and discrediting forever the role of the independent counsel.

Respect for law draws its essential sustenance from a sense of proportion. There is no cynicism more incandescent, no disrespect for law more derisive than in the hearts of those who see a three-time loser draw life without parole for stealing pizza, while the bank president draws a second home in Lake Tahoe for looting a savings and loan or a tax deductible-vineyard for bilking the government on a cost-plus defense contract.

To impeach Bill Clinton is to invite precisely that cynicism, that disrespect for the law that the president’s assailants claim they most wish to deter. Republicans pretend that for Clinton to lie about kissing Monica Lewinsky’s breasts offers the same injury to the rule of law as Nixon mustering half a million dollars to buy the silence of burglars about the identity of their White House sponsors. Republicans now solemnly proclaim that somehow Clinton’s fib is more of an affront than Nixon’s bribe, that the Reagan of Iran/Contra is a man of honor while Clinton is worthy of being driven from office for fooling with an intern.

When uproar of the elites over the Starr report was its most pompously intense, I remember writing that it is hard to take an affair set forth in the idiom of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and try to dress it up as a somber tragedy of state, like “Macbeth.” And so it seemed. But the House Republicans have done the trick. Oberon, Titania, Puck and Bottom have been hauled through the grand jury. We see dalliance reinvented as high crime.

The Republicans can scarcely believe their luck in having thus far got away with this ridiculous transmutation. They hope somehow that the American people won’t sit up and take notice, won’t bear any grudges next election day. Former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) says contemptuously that Americans care only about Christmas movies and the stock market and will never remember.

So perhaps we should welcome this solemn farce in prospect, this elephantine procedure so foolishly perched on its circus ball. The people would scarcely forget that, nor deny themselves judgment on the party that brought it to pass.