A Hard Lesson in Partisan Politics

It was House Judiciary Chairman Henry J. Hyde who cautioned more than a year ago against an impeachment effort without bipartisan support.

Though Hyde himself had long abandoned his own advice, his initial instincts were confirmed Friday by President Clinton’s acquittal in the Senate.

The impeachment struggle ended the way it began almost 13 months ago--with the nation’s capital irreparably divided along partisan lines over the legality (if not the morality) of Clinton’s actions and whether they justified his removal from office.

In a kind of fatal feedback loop, the sustained division between the parties in Washington proved crucial in denying Republicans the credibility they needed to build public support for their case in the country. And the lack of public support in turn proved critical in unifying Democratic opposition to Clinton’s removal--and encouraging the Republican defections that prevented even a simple Senate majority for either of the two impeachment articles, much less the two-thirds vote necessary to remove Clinton from office.

“In their wisdom, the public understood that it couldn’t be that all Democrats were on the wrong side of the rule of law, and all of the Republicans were on the right side,” presidential historian Robert Dallek said. “It came across to them as a partisan conflict, rather than a genuine struggle over criminal behavior.”

Marked From Start by Inter-Party Hostility

What may be left, is a public judgment of symmetrical excess. Clinton’s behavior with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky deeply dismayed the country. But so did the effort by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr and congressional Republicans to out him and then oust him for it.

It remains to be seen which half of that judgment--if either--will weigh more heavily in voters’ minds when they cast their ballots for Congress and president in 2000. But already apparent is that Starr and the GOP never made a strong enough case to attract support across party lines--either in Congress or the country--and that failure ultimately doomed their crusade.

“The notion that the motivation in going after [Clinton] was partisan . . . and not a desire to find the truth or seek justice was seared into people’s consciousness very early in this process,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said.

Though the Senate proceedings were more dignified and collegial than those in the House, the votes Friday stamped a final partisan imprint on a process that was defined from the outset by hostility between the parties. While not a single Senate Democrat voted to convict Clinton, all but five Senate Republicans voted to remove him from office on at least one of the two articles.

In some ways--despite the defection of 10 Republicans on the first article--the degree of Republican Party loyalty was even more remarkable Friday than in December’s House vote, when no more than 12 of the 228 Republicans voted against the two impeachment articles that passed.

In that case, many House Republicans argued that they were voting essentially to charge Clinton, as a grand jury might. In this case, 50 of the 55 Republican senators voted--on at least one of the two articles--to negate the 1996 election and remove him from office.

That extraordinary unity--like the parallel Democratic unanimity in opposition--underscored the extent to which this vote had become an almost tribal test of loyalty.

Conservative media consultant Craig Shirley was speaking specifically of Republicans, but he could have been describing the emotions on both sides when he said: “There have been key litmus tests over the years . . . where you say, ‘This guy is one of ours or this guy is a squish.’ This is going to be one of those touchstone votes that people remember years later.”

One can find evidence of that intensity in the way that ideology, far more than political vulnerability, shaped the pattern of Republican defection on the votes.

The only Republicans to vote against both articles--in effect, to vote that Clinton should remain in office--were all moderates from the Northeast: Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, John H. Chafee of Rhode Island, James M. Jeffords of Vermont and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. While three of those five (Chafee, Snowe and Jeffords) are up for reelection next year, only Jeffords is considered highly vulnerable.

By contrast, a group of closely watched younger conservatives who could face difficult reelection races next year in states the president carried in 1996 all voted to convict Clinton on both articles: Spencer Abraham in Michigan, Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania, Rod Grams in Minnesota, John Ashcroft in Missouri and Mike DeWine in Ohio. One other potentially vulnerable Republican in the class of 2000--Washington’s Slade Gorton--split his ballots.

The sharp partisan divide throughout this process stood in contrast to the Watergate crisis. However grudgingly, something approaching a bipartisan consensus finally emerged that Nixon should leave office. More than one-third of the House Judiciary Committee Republicans voted for both of the principal impeachment articles against Nixon in 1974 and ultimately it was a delegation of Republican elders who helped persuade him to resign.

Though some Democrats seemed poised to abandon Clinton in August after he acknowledged his affair with Lewinsky, only a handful of backbench House Democrats ever called for his resignation. That lock-step party loyalty in the president’s party frustrated congressional Republicans, who felt that they alone were being blamed for excessive partisanship.

In an interview with reporters this week, Hyde, for instance, complained: “It was naive thinking this could be bipartisan. This is about as hardball as you can get.”

Support Base Never Built

To some extent, the failure of such a Watergate-like consensus to emerge this time reflects the general increase in partisanship and the increasingly political approach to ethical disputes in the quarter century since Nixon resigned. But it also grew from the peculiar circumstances of this case: the country’s resistance to removing a president over a scandal inextricably rooted in sex, the circumstantial nature of the evidence against him and the skepticism--not just among Democrats--about the motives of his pursuers.

With all that against them, Hyde and his allies never built a public constituency for impeachment that could pressure Democrats to break party lines. Throughout the drumbeat of revelation that began last summer, impeachment and removal drew support from only a majority of rank-and-file Republicans. About nine Democrats in 10 and two-thirds of independents consistently opposed the president’s ouster.

Those numbers remained constant, even as the House succeeded in increasing the share of Americans who believed that Clinton was guilty of perjury (a number that hit 73% in Gallup polling last week) and, to a lesser extent, obstruction of justice (of which 49% believed Clinton to be guilty).

Yet Clinton’s critics never dented the belief in the country that his actions, while reprehensible, related more to his private life than to his public duties. “Generally speaking in America, we like fair play,” said Rich Galen, executive director of GOPAC, a conservative political group. “That may be the crux of this whole thing. Most people think that the Starr investigation into the Monica Lewinsky situation went beyond the bounds of fair play.”

Still to come are the political battles over the interpretation of these events. With Democrats--and apparently, at times, Clinton himself--threatening to use the impeachment votes against Republican legislators in 2000, some congressional GOP strategists worry that the failure to achieve a Senate majority on either impeachment article will strengthen the Democratic case “that the House managers were on a witch hunt,” as one GOP operative said.

Conversely, several Republican presidential contenders, such as former Vice President Dan Quayle, say that with the impeachment threat now removed, Clinton’s underlying behavior will loom as a problem for Vice President Al Gore in the presidential campaign.

Looming further over the horizon are the verdicts of history. In the last year, Clinton has seen his personal flaws exposed more graphically than any president before him. Yet the process seemed to raise as many questions about the judgment of Clinton’s accusers in Congress and the media as it did about him. For future generations, the task may be less to sort out winners from losers in this affair than to determine who lost the most.