Why Clinton Must Demand Impeachment

Recently, when asked to speculate on “the Clinton legacy,” I immediately thought of “The Wit and Wisdom of Spiro Agnew,” a book published before Nixon’s vice president was forced out of office. You open the book and all the pages are blank.

Lack of a legacy is not the worst possible fate. There can, after all, be bad legacy, such as the organized crime that was the legacy of the framers of the 18th Amendment, or, for some, FDR’s legacy of alphabetocracy. An even more positive non-legacy is a Hippocratic one that, well, the president did no harm. As for Clinton, up to now the only legacy I can identify is his contribution to his own party, by pulling it to the right, making it a “Yes, but” version of the other party.

But two years remain, and I’d like to take this opportunity to compensate for the terrible advice the president has been getting. Mr. President: I offer you here an opportunity to leave a legacy of inestimable value. It’s good for you as well the country, and it’s a natural for a president who once taught constitutional law.

First, you must refuse to submit to the Starr chamber--this means rejection, not delay. And this you must do on the constitutional grounds that the sanctions that enforce testimony in any judicial proceeding are penal, that conviction entails removal from office and that this is something that can only be done to a president by Congress. Follow President Andy Jackson, who argued forcefully that the president has as much right as the judiciary to interpret the Constitution. And no one ever stated your own case more clearly than Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 69: “The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction . . . removed from office; and would afterward be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.”

Second, you must accompany your refusal to appear before the grand jury with a demand for impeachment. This initiative must come from you. Impeachment, being a political process of the very highest order, would immediately transform the current low level of politics to the highest level of politics, the defense of the republic itself. Democratic politics destroys itself without orderly process, and the orderly process in America is the conduct of a politics within a three-branch structure that has been lost in a long epoch of divided government, delegation of legislative power, devolution of national power and an electoral campaign process in which most candidates become felons.

Third, you will then tell your story in a venue in which the canons of evidence are entirely different from those in the judiciary and where perjury and other high crimes and misdemeanors are judged solely within the context of the nature of the conduct itself, not the attempts to deny it, to cover it up or to misrepresent it. In other words, the court can see only the felonious allegations. Congress can, and will, weigh the nature of the initial conduct.

Fourth, this means you must hold your testimony strictly to those aspects of your conduct that bear upon abuse of your powers as president. You must focus your defense on the Hippocratic argument that, whatever the nature of your private conduct (on which you would remain absolutely silent), you have done the Constitution no harm.

Finally, by insisting on your own impeachment, you will have put your fate where it belongs. Members of Congress and all American citizens must understand that your fate is tied to the fate of the republic itself. By this initiative, you will have contributed significantly to elimination of many rotting sores on the body politic by elevating political discourse to a constitutional level and by putting the separation of powers back in order, with great presidential power balanced by ultimate parliamentary responsibility and electoral judgment.

Hurry, please. Time is of the essence. Don’t let pass this one shining moment, when l’etat c’est vous.