The Flexing of Muscles and a Concern for History

“Can you believe this? We’re actually impeaching a president. How the hell did this happen?”

--Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Dec. 11, 1998

*

All these months, the framed photograph hung on the wall of Henry J. Hyde’s congressional office, a discreet distance from the fading prints clustered near his desk.

Beyond the icons of Abraham Lincoln, Pope John Paul II and Sir Thomas More, Hyde could see the other from where he sat, an inscribed black-and-white picture of himself and a second man clasping hands. “To Rep. Henry Hyde,” read the inky scrawl. “With respect, Bill Clinton.”

Hyde waved a Jamaican cigar toward that image one November night after a wearying impeachment session with his factionalized Judiciary Committee. Sent over by the president several years earlier as a goodwill gesture, the photo had become an ironic totem of the process that was consuming Hyde’s life and wreaking political and constitutional Armageddon on the nation’s capital, a silent meditation on the vagaries of power.

“Power,” Hyde observed, “is the coin of the realm, and Mr. Clinton has used power very effectively and very dangerously.”

The process that has engulfed Clinton, Hyde and the two chambers of Congress over the last half-year is all about power: its uses and its abuses, its legitimacy and its lawlessness, its force and its fragility.

At the heart of the crisis lie hard legal and moral questions about how the president wielded the power of his office to stave off Monica S. Lewinsky’s embarrassing revelations. White House lawyers, congressional investigators and special prosecutors feinted at each other in committee rooms and courthouses over who had constitutional authority on their side.

After independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr delivered a voluminous and explicit report on his findings to Hyde’s committee, after the committee voted along strict party lines to recommend that Clinton be impeached, a polarized House just before Christmas bound the president over for a Senate trial.

The Senate’s struggle to shape a verdict that would satisfy history has since whipsawed between the minority Democrats’ numerical ability to block a guilty verdict and the Republican majority’s iron control over process.

Through all this, power ran in strange currents. Washington’s leaders had not been here before, and their six-month free-fall left many awe-struck and more than a little terrified.

It was as if an occult hand had substituted an alternate universe for the one they knew. Here was House Speaker Newt Gingrich, implacable enemy of liberal permissiveness, channeling the Starr report’s scabrous taped dialogue onto the Internet. Here was Bill Clinton, confronted with an FBI lab analysis of his DNA on the blue Gap dress, dancing into legal jeopardy before the grand jury. Here was Hyde, stung by voters’ reluctance and fresh from the wreckage of his party’s 1998 electoral drubbing, leading his impeachment managers on their solemn procession through the Rotunda into the well of the Senate.

House Republicans flexed their muscle to bring a president to trial, but somehow it was their own speakers who fell by the wayside: first Gingrich, humbled by the election returns, then his almost-successor, Bob Livingston of Louisiana, exposed as an adulterer himself.

There were solid historic and electoral explanations for some of the seeming madness. The scorched-earth tactics wielded by impeachment’s protagonists stemmed from nearly three decades of the use of scandal-as-weaponry. The calcification of modern politics was equally to blame, with its yawning cultural void between Democrats, still struggling like moths to tear away from the cocoon of 1960s leftism, and Republican conservatives, who pine for Reagan and define impeachment, as House Majority Whip Tom DeLay did, as “a debate about relativism versus absolute truth.”

Democrats and media commentators failed to take seriously the deeply felt passion among Republicans who came to perceive Clinton as the 1990s model of Nixon, guilty of mirror-image abuses of power.

“Either our whole society has changed,” Hyde said, “or [Clinton is] the luckiest guy in the world.”

Each time Hyde and his light brigade of impeachment crusaders reached a crossroads, they turned up the pressure but constantly failed to inflame an American public they had lost months ago.

“This whole thing is so insane,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) said after she watched the House’s Republican majority thwart House Democrats’ Dec. 18 resolution to censure Clinton but not impeach him. Her sigh curled in the gelid air as she trudged down the long marble stairwell from the Capitol and announced sadly: “I’m going shopping.”

Inside, they marched on into the guns.

Judiciary Panel Is Put in Charge

The lines began to calcify from the moment the two government-issue vans pulled into the Capitol parking lot on Sept. 9, carrying 34 banker’s boxes of files from Starr’s office. Hyde and Gingrich had set up their protocols months earlier: The Judiciary Committee would run the show. The talkative Gingrich would try to keep his mouth shut. The Republicans would follow the Watergate model of 1974, when Democratic Chairman Peter W. Rodino Jr. gently prodded a bipartisan majority toward drawing up articles of impeachment against Nixon.

They would act in accordance with “regular order,” the hoary House tradition of using House precedent as their guide. But as Judiciary lawyers descended on the guarded evidence vault in the Ford government building, regular order seemed to have evaporated.

Democrats could sense the public revulsion with Clinton but wondered how far they could stray in publicly rebuking him. Republicans were prepared to move against the president but were worried by his strong public approval ratings.

Privately, many Democrats raged at Clinton’s inability to control his urges. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut sadly stood up in the Senate to accuse Clinton of “immoral” acts. On vacation in a waterfront cabin, he had to referee an argument between his mother and daughter over whether the president should stay or go.

“If my own family couldn’t find common ground, I worried how the public was going to react,” Lieberman said later.

Lawyers leafing through the Starr materials were at first unsure of what had been dropped in their lap. “Aw, jeez,” grumbled David P. Schippers, counsel for the Judiciary Committee Republicans. “This is just Lewinsky. Where’s Filegate? Where’s Travelgate? Is this all there is?”

Only after delving deeper did he breathe easier. “I did a complete 180,” Schippers recalled. “Even with Lewinsky, this was plenty.”

Gingrich and Hyde moved rapidly to make Starr’s report public. Within days, thousands of copies were printed. The entire report was disgorged onto the Internet. Republicans wanted it all out for its “educational value,” as Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, the dour Robespierre of impeachment, put it. But there were tactical reasons too. An election was approaching. They needed something to jar the frozen dynamic of the polls.

‘His Capacity to Lie, Lie, Lie’

The analysis of Starr’s evidence by Hyde’s staff of Judiciary Committee investigators quietly reached a conclusion by late September: Clinton had committed impeachable acts. Hyde and his staff director, Tom Mooney, a Watergate veteran who helped craft the 1974 articles that forced Nixon’s resignation, concurred.

“Sure there were differences, but it was like 1974 all over again,” Mooney said later. “There was his illegal conduct, his mockery of the rule of law. The arrogance of this man, his capacity to lie, lie, lie. The covering up, the obstruction. It was all there.”

Mooney’s boss already felt the president was an opportunist who had no moral center or allegiance to the truth. And when the 74-year-old Hyde was speared by an Internet report about his own private betrayal of wife and family during what he called a “youthful indiscretion” in his 40s, he sank into his office in despair, wondering if Clinton aides had spread the story.

On that issue, at least, the White House moved quickly to reassure the Judiciary chairman. Old Illinois crony and former Clinton deputy Abner J. Mikva called Hyde to insist there was no involvement. Hyde was not convinced. Democratic eminences Lloyd N. Cutler and Robert S. Strauss tried their hand at behind-the-scenes parleys, probing for signs that Hyde might go for censure. But his back had stiffened.

House Democrats were equally entrenched. Judiciary Committee guerrillas launched an assault on Hyde’s cherished “process.” Acid-tongued Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank scoffed at the sexual underpinnings of the case. Lofgren fretted about its constitutional haste.

The president drew his own hard line. Clinton talked obliquely of contrition--the day the Starr documents arrived, he spoke haltingly about his sorrow to a gathering of clerics. But there would be no legal softening; Clinton insisted he had not committed perjury.

Only the American public offered Clinton good news. The Nov. 3 election cost Republicans five House seats and fed the fumbling Gingrich to his party’s wolves. On election night, padding around the West Wing in his socks, Clinton excitedly scanned a computer screen for data on House races in which Republicans had run ads excoriating his conduct. The GOP, he felt, had overplayed its hand.

“He had five Diet Cokes and a shrimp quesadilla to celebrate,” said a friend who was there. “He was chewing on an unlit cigar, loose as a goose. It was clear to everybody the whole dynamic had changed.”

Or had it? Republican moderates began lowing for an exit strategy; Illinois Rep. John Edward Porter, an old Hyde ally, blurted out in an interview that censure was the only practical way out. But he was too far ahead of the curve. Porter called Hyde to apologize. Hyde and his Judiciary core were bulling ahead while House Republicans were rebuilding their leadership team.

White House strategists later second-guessed themselves for failing to take advantage of the electoral gains. “If we had started right after the election with an active crusade for censure, we might have had a prayer,” lamented one strategist.

DeLay, who had consolidated power after the election debacle, set the terms for the impeachment debate by publicly questioning censure’s legitimacy, making it difficult for moderates to buck the tidal wave. The Texan cannily understood the arguments that would sway the moderates: the emphasis on the rule of law, the comparisons to Nixon’s crimes, the old Clinton sins that still ate at uncommitted Republican congressmen like Louisiana’s W. J. “Billy” Tauzin, who never forgave the president for “lying to my face” about an energy tax vote. Without a clear admission of guilt, Clinton “wasn’t giving us any choice,” said Rep. Brian P. Bilbray of San Diego.

The election results and the moderates’ drumbeat for censure united the conservatives in anger. They had been a disorganized force, drawing only a few thousand partisans to a Washington rally that proceeded like a Tory Woodstock. One emcee cursed like a rock star before launching into the Pledge of Allegiance. Lucianne Goldberg exhorted them on, clad in the tour jacket of a right-wing Web site.

When the newspaper Human Events compiled a “wanted list” of 20 GOP congressmen considered “soft on impeachment,” that finally gave conservatives a target. The list, said Anne Coulter, author of an anti-Clinton screed called “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” made it clear “to the wavering moderates that this was a vote they would not soon forget.”

Slowly, the scales tipped. Like the conservatives, many GOP moderates concluded that their strong Republican home bases would not tolerate a vote against impeachment. Hyde’s committee sent Clinton a list of 81 questions designed to force him to show his legal hand. But the answers, vetted by his lawyers, still evaded the central question.

Porter kept hoping DeLay would allow a censure vote. But DeLay, a former Houston exterminator, had plugged all the mouse holes. Even if censure were an option, Clinton had botched it: His refusal to say he had committed crimes left Porter ready to impeach.

In San Diego, restless after weeks of surfing and listening to his two young children argue over the president’s fate, Bilbray had almost made up his mind. He pored over Alexander Hamilton’s seminal writings one night, then on impulse, decided to call the White House, which had offered to contact any undecided Republicans.

He reached one of Clinton’s lawyers. As Bilbray detailed his inner turmoil, a question formed in his mind. “How do I explain this to my children? If I can’t explain it to them, how am I going to explain it to my constituents?”

The air went dead for a moment. Then the lawyer spoke: “I can’t explain it to my own.”

Compromise Spirit Was Senatorial Art

It was supposed to be different in the Senate.

This is where the trial of President William Jefferson Clinton would become high drama, where 100 senators would counterbalance the partisan urges that had divided the lower House with the higher jurisprudence only senators could muster.

The spirit of compromise that had eluded the House was a senatorial art, and when the unlikely duo of Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Phil Gramm (R-Texas) cobbled a plan to bring on opening arguments and ignore for the moment knotty questions about whether Lewinsky and other witnesses would testify, they congratulated themselves for trailblazing toward sanity.

The president’s lawyers were forever cautioning that any testimony would force them to trigger the doomsday machine of evidence discovery, bogging down proceedings for months. Hyde kept genuflecting before the upper body with his courtly waspishness, begging their indulgence for his “blue-collar” prosecutors’ pleas for witnesses.

But the jurors were reaching across party lines, clustering in excited huddles during trial recesses, dickering among themselves in their private lunch quarters, in the cloakrooms, in the subways. Surrounded by a scrum of reporters, Iowa Republican Charles E. Grassley encountered Montana Democrat Max Baucus in the subterranean Senate just after Republicans had turned down a proposal to cut the trial short by eliminating witnesses and early motions to dismiss. “There’s a feeling there are still some questions that should be answered,” Grassley said.

The two men chewed over the morning’s news, noodling over the timing of the trial and the need to allow Republicans to “cast at least one vote,” Baucus said, “to satisfy certain political needs.”

It was their way of showing the news mob around them that senators did things their own way: They could talk, compromise, bring the long free-fall of impeachment to a soft landing.

“Don’t forget,” Grassley called as Baucus headed for his office, “we’re supposed to be running the show, not the lawyers.”

But in a crucial vote last Wednesday on whether witnesses would be deposed, only one of the 100 senators, Democrat Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, crossed party lines. The partisan fault line that had long walled off House Republicans and Democrats had now fishtailed down through the Rotunda, past the grand Ohio Clock and into the Senate’s ornate main chamber.

It all came down to the simplest arithmetic. Republicans outnumbered Democrats, 55 to 45. They could get their way on “process.” But the 210-year-old Constitution requires two-thirds of the senators for a vote to convict. That means 67 senators, 12 more than there are Republicans.

All Sen. John B. Breaux (D-La.) could think of as he emerged from the party-line vote was the metaphor from the Vietnam War.

“We keep looking for that light at the end of the tunnel,” Breaux said. “We just can’t find it.”