Keep It Constitutional

The House impeachment managers who are prosecuting President Clinton before the Senate have asked all the questions they cared to ask of the three witnesses they chose to call and apparently learned little of help to their case. That won’t stop them from appealing to the Senate today to compel public testimony from Monica S. Lewinsky, Vernon Jordan, the president’s chum, and Sidney Blumenthal, a political hit man for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Clearly the House managers are ready to prolong this trial until the last senator keels over from terminal boredom, but even senators who want to convict Clinton of high crimes and misdemeanors are signaling they have had enough. The trial phase of this proceeding is effectively over, and today’s vote on the witnesses should say so.

Though it may have added only marginally to the stupefyingly voluminous record, this week’s videotaped questioning of the three witnesses should nonetheless be made public. Repetitious and unilluminating though the testimony may be, it is part of a historic event and deserves to be released in full. For the same reason, the Senate’s pending debate on whether to convict or acquit Clinton on charges of perjury and obstructing justice should take place before the eyes of the nation and not in a closed chamber.

Even if the Senate deservedly rejects the House managers’ plea to hear witnesses, its route toward ending the trial by Feb. 12 will remain rocky. No one any longer believes that 67 votes can be found to convict Clinton and end his presidency. Recognizing that, Republicans continue to search for a variation on their leadership’s notion of a “finding of fact” that, in so many words and by a simple majority vote, would declare Clinton guilty of willfully lying under oath and trying to obstruct justice.

We have held from the onset of the impeachment process that Clinton’s behavior in the Lewinsky affair has earned him the strongest condemnation. That could be expressed, without any question of its being extra-constitutional, in a joint congressional resolution. Conversely, the notion of a “finding of fact” to brand Clinton guilty of the same crimes of which an impeachment vote surely would acquit him is a brazen effort to circumvent the letter and spirit of the Constitution. Republicans have always insisted that the impeachment process is solely about upholding the sanctity and dignity of the law. A partisan, constitutionally unsanctioned “finding of fact” would make a mockery of that standard.