Clinton Defenders Put Political Heat on Panel

WASHINGTON — It may have been the political equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater.

Faced with a core of House Republicans determined to impeach the president, and a public resistant to the idea but largely disengaged from the debate, the White House seemed to have one goal above all at Tuesday’s Judiciary Committee hearing: to convince the House--and the public--that a vote to impeach, even without a Senate conviction, would be a momentous decision with far-reaching political, policy and historical ramifications.

“The goal of the Republicans so far--and they have been effective at it--is to make this vote as small and insignificant as possible,” said one senior White House official. “The bigger the vote, the more significant the vote, the harder it is for them to cast this vote.”

That was the administration’s message from the outset. The White House’s first panel--an assemblage of legal experts and historians anchored by gray eminences Nicholas deB. Katzenbach and Samuel H. Beer--offered almost a generational reproach to the hotheaded baby boomers on both sides of the Judiciary Committee who have reduced the debate over removing a president into little more than a typical partisan shouting match.

Beer, a prominent historian at Harvard, spoke of “the dire responsibility of removing a popularly elected president.” Katzenbach, the attorney general under President Johnson, insisted that impeachment is justified only when “the president has done something which has destroyed public confidence in his ability to continue in the job.” Both men sounded something like parents warning children to stop playing with matches.

Yet even as the White House tried to underscore the gravity of the case, the day also captured the almost surrealistic atmosphere in Washington that has allowed the process to advance this far without any appreciable sense of crisis--or, at times, even tension.

As the Judiciary Committee opened its sometimes testy debate on whether to remove the president from office, at a conference across town Clinton and legislators from both parties had just finished pledging to work together on the most significant domestic policy issue facing them in 1999: restructuring the Social Security system for the next century.

Congenial Discussion Amid Partisan Conflict

That congenial discussion reflected the assumption that has drained much of the drama out of the impeachment debate since last month’s election: the widespread understanding that however the House votes, there is virtually no chance that Clinton will either be forced from office or leave it voluntarily.

In fact, the two Republicans who joined Clinton on the Social Security panel--Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. of Florida and Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania--both insisted that only the president could forge a national consensus on reforming the system. That was a somewhat jarring argument from leaders of a party advancing the legislative process to remove Clinton from office.

Increasingly, the White House has come to view that relaxed attitude toward impeachment--the sense that House approval would not be that consequential--as one of the most serious risks now confronting it.

Trying to catch the public’s attention, each side Tuesday sometimes stretched its arguments to the edge of self-parody. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) suggested that advancing the impeachment process to the Senate could damage the economy. Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) argued that Clinton was worthy of impeachment because he described his relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky before the grand jury as “intimate” rather than sexual.

But compared to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s appearance before the committee last month, this session was much more sober and substantive--a sign perhaps that the weight of the approaching decisions is beginning to tell.

Staunch Republicans Remain Steadfast

Retreating not an inch, committee Republicans hammered above all at evidence that the president lied--both before the grand jury and in his deposition in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment case--and warned that failure to impeach would undermine respect for the rule of law. If the House does not vote to impeach, said Rep. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), “what worries me the most is we’re sending a terrible message.”

In response, the White House offered the most concentrated and focused defense it has yet mustered through the 11-month controversy. After infuriating congressional Republicans with narrow legal defenses and broad personal attacks on Starr, the White House Tuesday tried to craft a more panoramic case against impeachment and the quality of Starr’s case.

While Republican members somewhat inexplicably chastised the White House for not contesting the facts in Starr’s case, special White House counsel Gregory B. Craig and ranking Democrat John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) repeatedly challenged the prosecutor’s charges that Clinton tried to obstruct justice, hide evidence or tamper with witnesses--arguments that the White House developed at greater length in the 184-page brief it released Tuesday night.

On perjury, the Democrats offered a considerably more nuanced and tortured defense: Craig said that while Clinton’s testimony in the Jones case “was evasive, incomplete, misleading, even maddening” it did not legally qualify as perjury because Clinton either answered “accurately in a very narrow way” or did not intend to mislead.

With Republicans openly scorning those arguments, the White House witnesses sought to construct a second line of defense. All four members of a panel of historians and legal experts argued that, even if Clinton did lie to conceal his affair with Lewinsky, his behavior still did not meet the standard intended for removing a president.

“The question is whether the conduct alleged represents an assault on the fundamental principles of government,” said Yale University law professor Bruce Ackerman. “If this conduct represents that, our history over the last two centuries would be littered with bills of impeachment.”

Legal Scholars Offer Insights

Those arguments fed into a third line of defense: the contention that House Republicans are dangerously “trivializing” impeachment by viewing it more as a way of expressing outrage than as a solemn step toward ousting a president.

Could an impeachment vote be interpreted as a form of “censure-plus,” as some conservatives have suggested? “Nothing could be more improper than to use the impeachment process as a punishment,” Katzenbach said.

Is a House impeachment vote--which would send the issue to the Senate for a trial--analogous to a grand jury returning an indictment? “To see that as your role I think is a violation of your oath of office,” Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz said.

Behind all of these legal and historical arguments was a two-pronged political case--equal parts balm and threat. Aiming directly at the concerns of moderate Republicans, Craig tried to stress the president’s contrition--describing Clinton’s conduct as “sinful.” Craig insisted that he has told his own children the case shows the high cost of lying.

Yet, at the same time, Craig and the other White House witnesses tried to subtly warn wavering Republicans that there could be a political cost for voting to impeach at a time when fully 66% of Americans still oppose it, according to a Gallup Poll survey released Monday.

Ackerman and other witnesses raised the specter of a lengthy Senate trial that “will disrupt the nation’s business . . . for a year.” Democrats also tried to generate outrage over the GOP insistence on moving impeachment forward in the face of polls showing such widespread resistance.

Both of those arguments appeared designed to engage Americans who may oppose impeachment but have sat by quietly while conservative groups have mobilized support for a vote against the president.

“This is a very volatile thing,” said the senior White House official. “Over the last 11 months, the focus nationally has ebbed and flowed. And I don’t believe we have seen the last ebb or flow.”