How Clinton Can Win: Keep Denying

This week, there’s new momentum on Capitol Hill for the idea of censuring President Clinton. Some Republicans, sensing the imminent failure of impeachment proceedings, are dropping their opposition to the censure option, while some Democrats are reviving their calls for a formal wrist-slap. Even the White House is signaling cautious acceptance.

But there appears to be some confusion over what the president should be censured for. The Oval Office trysts with Monica Lewinsky? Lying under oath in the Jones deposition? Lying under oath before the Starr grand jury? Obstruction of justice? Witness tampering?

That’s the sticking point. The White House and Democrats on the Hill want you to believe the president has already confessed to everything that matters. “He has publicly admitted his wrongdoing; he has apologized for it,” Clinton advisor Paul Begala said recently. Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), the president’s loudest defender on the House Judiciary Committee, says flatly that “the president has, in fact, admitted his wrongdoing.”

But in truth, the president has never admitted any of the impeachable acts alleged by Kenneth Starr. Last weekend, for example, the president’s special counsel, Gregory Craig, insisted that the president had never lied under oath.

Clinton’s no-compromise position puts the House in a bind and could be the strategy by which the president walks away from the Lewinsky scandal with no formal reprimand. Even if Republicans want to wash their hands of impeachment, it may not be possible to come up with the votes for a respectable censure resolution for a president who won’t admit anything beyond having an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky and later misleading his family, friends and the public about it. If that were the standard, Congress might as well have censured Clinton years ago for “causing pain” in his marriage.

No, if censure is to be a form of plea bargain for the president in the Lewinsky case, Republicans need an admission of at least some of the misdeeds uncovered by Starr--something Clinton has shown no inclination to do. (He’ll have another chance when he finally responds to Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde’s detailed “admit or deny” letter.) Suppose Clinton keeps resisting. What then?

“There has to be a sense of accountability,” says committee member Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “He’s trying to reconcile himself with his family, which is great. He’s trying to let the American people know he was misleading. But the crucial issue is to reconcile himself with the law. Thus far, he has tried to say that he was legally accurate in his deposition and grand jury testimony, when the evidence is overwhelming that he was not accurate, that it was false, that it was perjurious.”

Such demands for accountability are perfectly reasonable, but the simple truth is that the Republicans don’t have any good options. Without the threat of impeachment, the GOP has little muscle to back up its threats; a defendant has no incentive to plea bargain when he knows the authorities can’t hurt him.

And now it looks like some of the more partisan Democrats are setting up a classic bait-and-switch. They once favored censure, they’ll say, but Republicans chose to go the impeachment route. The hearings, the articles of impeachment, the committee vote: Hasn’t the president suffered enough? “The road we’re headed now is a vote on impeachment and not getting enough votes to censure the president or admonish him in any way,” Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.) said Sunday. “I think the Republicans will have no one to blame but themselves if the president gets off without anything at all.”

With that in mind, look for a new strategy from the House Republicans: the appeal to history. We’re right, the facts are on our side, they’ll argue, but the president won the game. All they can hope for now is that at some point in the future, people will reassess the evidence and finally recognize the extent of Clinton’s corruption. “I think, historically,” Graham said, “most people will see that there was a tremendous case for perjury against the president that went unchallenged.”