Clinton’s Fate Ultimately Rests in Hands of the Public

With President Clinton’s impeachment today by the House of Representatives now a foregone conclusion, the real audience for Friday’s marathon debate was the jury in living rooms across America.

The debate opened the next stage of the increasingly ferocious struggle over Clinton’s future--the battle to shape the public’s interpretation of today’s historic vote. In long and often bitter exchanges, Republicans presented the vote as a principled defense of the rule of law and Democrats as a partisan assault upon it.

With polls on the eve of the debate showing a clear majority of Americans still opposed to impeachment, the threat now facing Clinton is that the vote itself could erode public resistance to removing the president.

“The issue,” said Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, “is how much legitimacy does the public give the House action?”

The answer could determine whether Clinton rides out the storm and serves out his term--or succumbs to torrents of pressure to resign rather than contest a Senate trial. “The reaction to this is critical,” said Yale University political scientist David Mayhew. “It will shape what happens down the line.”

For both sides, today’s vote will escalate the struggle into something approaching total political war.

Impeachment opponents, led by organized labor and liberal groups such as People for the American Way, are discussing whether to establish a formal national coalition to carry the fight and planning to barrage Senate offices with e-mail and phone calls opposing conviction.

Exploring Legality of Recall Campaigns

They are even investigating the legality of mounting recall campaigns against some of the Republican House members who vote for impeachment today. (Most legal analysts believe that the dozen or so state laws allowing the recall of state officials cannot be applied to federal officeholders.)

“If this goes to the Senate, you’ll end up with a big grass-roots campaign . . . working everything from television advertising to [lobbying] people’s contributors,” said Democratic consultant Tony Podesta, who has been involved in the efforts.

California’s state Democratic Party, after concluding that state law would not allow recall efforts against Republicans who back impeachment, already is laying plans to advertise against the three Southern California GOP legislators who have indicated support for impeachment even though their districts voted for Clinton in 1996: Brian P. Bilbray of San Diego, Stephen Horn of Long Beach and James E. Rogan of Glendale.

Bob Mulholland, campaign advisor to state Democrats, said that the party already has begun serious conversations about recruiting a candidate against Bilbray in particular. “We are not going to let these guys get away with this murder,” Mulholland said. “Even though we can’t do recall, we are going to make some of these guys feel like they are being recalled.”

Conservatives also are planning to intensify their efforts. “It will be very heavy talk radio,” said Greg Mueller, a GOP media consultant who has worked with the Christian Coalition and the magazine Human Events to build grass-roots pressure for impeachment. Mueller said that conservatives also will step up their use of the Internet to generate e-mail to senators demanding Clinton’s removal.

The Christian Coalition, which has delivered more than 300,000 petitions supporting impeachment, is planning to shift its focus to the Senate. Reflecting a broader shift in Republican strategy, the group also is planning to recalibrate its message.

“You are going to see more of a focus on the issue of resignation because the president is now in the position of being the one person who stands between a protracted trial and getting this behind us,” said Christian Coalition Executive Director Randy Tate.

With Republicans likely to echo that call en masse over the next few days, today’s vote could thrust Clinton back into the precarious situation he confronted last September when independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr released his report on the president’s efforts to conceal his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky.

Clinton’s Future Could Repeat Past

This vote could leave Clinton in the same position as he was then: needing to prevent defections from prominent Democrats that could create a chain reaction undermining his support. “I don’t think there is any question we are back in the same situation [as September],” said the senior political advisor to one prominent Senate Democrat. “If you start to see three or four Democrats fold, there is going to be great pressure on a lot of these guys [to abandon Clinton].”

Though two rank-and-file House Democrats this week called on Clinton to quit if he is impeached, at the moment, Senate Democratic aides see no indications that any of the party’s senators plan to join in. Public opinion is likely to be a key to the longevity of that resolve.

Overall, public support for impeachment has increased, but only modestly, since the House Judiciary Committee debate began in earnest earlier this month. A series of national polls late this week still found that about 60% of Americans oppose impeachment. What concerns Democrats is the prospect that today’s vote could change that dynamic--or build support for the alternative Tate and other Republicans are now aggressively pushing--resignation.

With little hope of changing any minds in the House, both sides unabashedly used Friday’s debate to launch that competition to shape the public reaction to impeachment.

Republicans, putting behind them their uncertainty about how to deal with a scandal inescapably rooted in sex, offered a clear, unequivocal and unwavering message: This isn’t about sex, and it isn’t about Clinton. It is about upholding the principle that in the United States, no man is above the law. This principle, they argued, undergirds all liberties.

“Let’s be clear: The vote that all of us are asked to cast is, in the final analysis, a vote on the rule of law,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde of Illinois insisted in his lead-off remarks. “The alternative is the rule of hard power.”

Down that road rumbled almost every Republican speaker, alternately insisting that failing to remove Clinton would mean “subversion of the courts” (Rogan), undermine the legal process “that protects each one of us from false allegations” (Rep. Nancy L. Johnson of Connecticut) and even invite anarchy: “Societies that ignore their laws are condemned to violence and chaos” (Rep. Elton Gallegley of Simi Valley).

For Democrats, the primary goal was stamping the Republican vote as an exercise not in principle but in partisanship--which, according to recent polls, is how most Americans now view the struggle. In sharp language that underscored the passions evoked by this struggle, several Democrats described the impending vote as a “Republican coup d’etat.”

Democrats Challenge GOP Assertions

Without defending Clinton’s conduct, Democrats turned the Republican argument on its head: Impeaching a president for these offenses on a virtually party-line vote would not uphold the rule of law but undermine it. “You may have the votes. You may have the muscle. But you do not have the legitimacy of a national consensus or of a constitutional imperative,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York.

Perhaps more important in shaping the public reaction than any of these rhetorical arguments will be the reality of today’s vote. Nothing would undermine the Democratic case--or Clinton’s defenses--more than a significant number of Democratic votes for impeachment.

That threat frames the fallback Democratic goal today: not so much defeating the articles of impeachment as ensuring that they are seen, in the words of Rep. Zoe Lofgren of San Jose, as a vengeful Republican effort to overturn an election by ousting a “president . . . they could not defeat at the polls.”