Death of the Imperial Presidency

The impeachment of Bill Clinton is, as the saying goes, one for the history books. Nothing seems likely to be more memorable about Clinton’s presidency than the 1998 debate over whether he should be impeached and removed from office.

Historians will struggle to make sense of what will seem like relatively trivial reasons for the current assault on the president. Alongside the two earlier impeachment crises in 210 years of presidential history, the Clinton impeachment seems almost silly.

The Andrew Johnson impeachment and trial were about how to reconstruct the Union after a war that cost 620,000 lives. Richard Nixon’s resignation came after irrefutable evidence of presidential abuse of power: an effort to subvert a presidential election, obstruction of justice to cover up White House wrongdoing and a cover-up of the cover-up, as the additional 201 hours of Watergate tapes now make crystal clear.

No future commentator will or should let Clinton off the hook for his embarrassing behavior in the White House. No Clinton apology, including his most recent appeal on Friday, will ever fully repair the damage to the dignity of the highest elected office; the president’s sleaziness and Monica jokes will echo through history.

Historians also will have little kind to say about Clinton’s astuteness as a politician. As only the third president in the country’s history to face an impeachment crisis, Clinton will not get high marks for effective leadership or management of Congress.

Still, historians will not see Clinton’s reckless private behavior as the principal source of this impeachment struggle. They will view the current travail as the culmination of events dating from the 1960s. Specifically, they will explain Congress’ action against Clinton as a culmination of or endgame in the decline of the imperial presidency; Clinton’s impeachment crisis speaks volumes about the loss of presidential authority.

Historians will begin with Lyndon Johnson’s credibility gap over the Vietnam War; Nixon’s protestations that he was not a crook and eventual resignation; the creation of an office of independent counsel or special prosecutor; the Intelligence Committee hearings of 1975-76 revealing CIA and FBI constitutional abuses sanctioned by the White House; and the Iran-Contra scandal during Ronald Reagan’s second administration. All have eroded public trust in the White House. Congress and the media are less respectful of presidential authority and that has led to a weakened presidential capacity to lead the country. More important, the change in perspective toward the presidency has made Congress--or at least some considerable number of representatives and senators--all too ready to reverse a national election by ousting a sitting president.

Perhaps nothing has contributed more to the current mood than the end of the Cold War. The imperial presidency was largely the product of the international contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. When Dwight Eisenhower lied to the country in 1960 about the U-2 spy plane and then explained it as necessitated by national security in the face of the Soviet threat, no one called for his impeachment or even a reprimand.

Now partisanship between a Republican Congress and a Democratic White House has turned into demands for the president’s removal for lying about sex. It is probably the case that the president has committed perjury before a grand jury, but it is almost inconceivable that an opposition Congress would be calling for his head if the nation were still in the midst of a serious struggle abroad.

What then should be done? Moderate House Republicans, who hold the key to the president’s fate, should put aside any feelings of personal antagonism toward Clinton for his legalistic response to the charges against him and vote against impeachment. They could then lead a resolution of reprimand and censure through the House that would leave a significant negative mark on his legacy. Making Clinton the only president in American history to have been permanently censured (the censure of Andrew Jackson was later expunged by a Democratic-controlled Senate) would be a meaningful punishment for a president who is so concerned about the judgment of history.