A Jury of Millions

Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s report to Congress on the affair between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky is now in the public domain. Its descriptive details are as salacious as the battalions of rumors that preceded their release had suggested. Americans do not expect their presidents to be saints. We do ask that they conduct themselves so as not to bring disrespect to the office. Decorum is not a mode of behavior to be displayed only at state dinners. It goes with the job, full-time.

The Starr report, which is required by law if the independent counsel believes his investigation has found potential grounds for impeachment, in a sense is a case for the prosecution. The House Judiciary Committee may determine after its own hearings that articles of impeachment are warranted. If a majority of the House agrees, the matter goes to the Senate, which sits as a jury--with the chief justice of the United States presiding--while the articles of impeachment are argued. It takes a two-thirds vote of the Senate to convict and remove a president from office.

In order to ascertain whether that serious step of impeachment should be taken, hearings--as yet unscheduled--must be the fair, careful, judicious airings that members of both parties have promised. Of course that will be a challenge, but we’re confident that members of the committee will keep foremost in their minds the best interests of this nation. Their conduct will affect every level of public office.

Impeachment is a quasi-judicial process but also a highly political one, since the Constitution’s vagueness on the legal basis for determining wrongdoing gives Congress wide discretion in deciding what acts are criminal. But politics in the larger, nonpartisan sense also applies. The president will be judged not only by Congress but more immediately in the court of public opinion. And here Bill Clinton is in deep trouble.

The public had seemed inclined to shrug off Clinton’s admitted adultery. Whether that moral indifference will survive Friday’s lurid revelations is another matter. The picture of Clinton that now emerges is that of a middle-aged man with a pathetic inability to control his sexual fancies, the seducer of a willing but immature young woman. Lewinsky was by no means an innocent. But the man who twice was entrusted with the nation’s highest office certainly should have been able to reject the temptations of quick and dirty and sometimes peculiar sex in the corridors of the presidential suite.

We have heard repeatedly from Washington that this scandal is not about sex. That’s totally disingenuous. The prurient details of illicit sex and the lying that goes with it have fueled the scandal from day one. That said, it is also about more than sex. And it is the other allegations that have to do with Clinton’s qualifications and abilities to lead America that must be the focus of the hearings.

The White House says Clinton plans to wage a vigorous defense, focused on trying to show that the offenses Starr alleges he committed--perjury, obstruction of justice, abuse of power--did not occur and that therefore there is no justification for impeachment. Meanwhile, the nation will have at its head a severely wounded president, his credibility shattered, a laughingstock to some, a reprobate to others. Clinton said recently that these have been the worst days of his life. They haven’t been the best of times for the country, either.