Debate Before Judiciary Committee Dispels Impeachment Issue Myths

Dramatic, emotional and even riveting as they were, last week’s debates before the House Judiciary Committee only set the stage for the real showdown as the full House is to vote this week--for only the second time in the nation’s history--on whether to impeach a president. It’s not even clear that many minds were changed during the dawn-to-dusk proceedings--either in the House, which still looks to be leaning slightly toward impeachment, or the country, which remains overwhelmingly opposed to it.

But the aggressive two-day defense by the White House, and the fierce three days of debate in the committee that followed, did dispel several of the central myths that have clouded the impeachment debate. In that way, the sessions starkly clarified the choices facing Congress and the country. After last week, several of the myths that both sides have employed are lying by the side of the road--perforated and debunked.

Myth No. 1: Impeachment isn’t that big a deal. With the vote approaching, several of President Clinton’s most ardent critics have tried to soften resistance by defining impeachment down. Rep. Charles T. Canady (R-Fla.) recently called impeachment “basically [a vote] to accuse and censure the president.” Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.) described it as “the ultimate scarlet letter.”

But the panel of historians and legal experts who testified for the White House last week demolished those arguments. Rather than viewing impeachment as a means for Congress to express disapproval, they argued powerfully that the founders intended it as the solemn first step in removing a president. Historian Samuel Beer framed the real standard that the nation’s founders believed should guide legislators in this week’s vote: “Does the national interest require the removal from office of this president?”

Myth No. 2: The White House doesn’t contest the facts in independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s referral. That’s been the mantra of impeachment hawks for weeks. But the White House challenged all of Starr’s conclusions immediately after his report was released in September, and they forcefully elaborated on that critique last week.

On the most serious charges, the White House poked huge holes in Starr’s case. Did Clinton, as the committee alleges, tamper with a witness by guiding his secretary, Betty Currie, through a series of leading questions last January? At the time, Currie wasn’t a witness in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment case--and besides, Currie testified that she felt no pressure to agree with Clinton’s statements.

Did Clinton arrange a job for Monica S. Lewinsky to buy her silence in the Jones case? The job hunt began months before she was subpoenaed, and Lewinsky testified that “I was never promised a job for my silence.” Did Clinton conspire with Lewinsky to hide his gifts to her? Currie testified it was Lewinsky who suggested that Currie pick up the gifts, and Lewinsky never testified that Clinton told her to hide them. Such exculpatory evidence led William F. Weld, a former Justice Department prosecutor and Republican governor of Massachusetts, to summarize Starr’s case at the hearings this way: “I think it’s a little thin.”

Myth No. 3: Clinton didn’t lie in the Jones case. It’s on this ground that the White House’s defense is weakest. Compared to the aggressive tone in the rest of the White House’s 184-page defense brief released last week, the sections defending Clinton’s testimony in the Jones case are tortured and grasping; the White House even tries quoting an MSNBC talking head to make its case. It also engages in the same kind of misleading, selective quoting that it has (fairly) accused Starr of, particularly in trying to rebut the conclusion that Clinton lied when asked if “it was possible” that he had ever been alone with Lewinsky.

Whether or not those answers meet the legal standards (of material relevance) for perjury, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that during the Jones deposition, Clinton frequently intended to deceive. The question is whether deception on a tangential issue in a civil case that was dismissed and then settled out of court is grounds for impeaching a president.

Myth No. 4: This isn’t just about sex. It is. Every allegation against Clinton in Starr’s referrals and the committee’s articles of impeachment relates to the president’s efforts to hide his sexual affair with Lewinsky. Indeed, the heart of the entire case for impeachment remains the contention that Clinton lied in his Jones deposition--and then lied again before Starr’s grand jury--when he insisted that his sexual encounters with Lewinsky did not fall under the definition of sex provided in the Jones case because, while she touched him, he says he did not touch her.

Common sense may say he’s lying. But winning a perjury case on such a he-said, she-said dispute wouldn’t be easy, especially after Clinton has already admitted to “inappropriate intimate contact” with Lewinsky. And as former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste eloquently argued at the hearings, even that analysis obscures the true absurdity involved here.

“Simply using the word ‘perjury,’ ” Ben-Veniste said, “does not convey the discrepancy between what remedy you are talking about--to disenfranchise all of the United States in its elected president, taking away their vote, nullifying it, and saying he cannot be president anymore because he did not testify to these details in the grand jury. To me, that is mind-boggling.”

As they near this week’s vote, House Republicans may still be holding on to Myth No. 5: the hope that the public will support the president’s removal once it has all the facts. But with polls showing as many as two-thirds of Americans still opposing impeachment--and the GOP’s favorability ratings plummeting--that myth is exploding too.

Clinton enraged Republicans again Friday when he refused to say that he had committed perjury. That created new problems by inflaming old passions. Hatred of Clinton is the itch that many Republicans cannot stop scratching--whether they tear through skin or blood or bone. With all other myths gone, that fury is now driving the GOP to test one last myth: the belief that voters will impose no political cost on the Republican Congress for voting--on a virtual party-line basis, in a lame-duck session--to flout the public’s decisive opposition to impeaching the president.