Impeachment Drama Act III: Treaty Vote

The final act of the Clinton impeachment drama was played out on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Wednesday night as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty went down to defeat by a 51-48 vote (67, or two-thirds, votes were needed). While no clause of the treaty said anything about obstruction of justice or lying to a grand jury, the pentimento of the two articles of impeachment voted against Bill Clinton could be discerned behind the fine print of the treaty. The legacy of distrust between the senators, Republican and Democratic alike, and the Clinton White House was as much the cause of the defeat of the treaty as the pact’s technical shortcomings.

From the time that GOP Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi snookered the White House and his Democratic colleagues by calling for a quick vote on the very treaty they had been unsuccessfully urging for more than a year, the choice for most senators was between ratifying a treaty that even its backers conceded was imperfect or voting it down and thereby humiliating the president and embarrassing the country. Even some senators who would gleefully have forced the president to drink the cup of humiliation to its very dregs were reluctant to damage the nation’s standing in the eyes of the world.

The device that was settled on by a group of Senate moderates of both parties, including New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Virginia Republican John Warner, was to postpone consideration of the treaty until after the 2000 general election by sending it back to the Foreign Relations Committee for further study. That was supposed to pull the fangs from the pact as a political issue.

However, an agreement to postpone a vote, according to the Senate’s arcane rules, would have required the assent of all 100 senators. It is possible that no concession would have satisfied such intransigent treaty opponents as Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms of North Carolina or Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, but it is at least possible that some kind of agreement that averted an immediate vote and certain defeat for the treaty might have been reached.

What was required by treaty opponents was a pair of pledges that the deferral of the treaty would not be used as a cudgel against the GOP in the 2000 election. These pledges would be exacted from the Democratic floor leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who would agree not to attempt to reintroduce the treaty, and from President Clinton, who would be required to request, in writing, that the treaty be withdrawn from immediate consideration. Both Daschle and Clinton complied.

Fearing, perhaps, that even a statement by Clinton that it was he who had requested that the treaty be temporarily pulled would not insulate them from a damaging charge by the president that he had been the victim of Republican extortion, GOP hard-liners pressed for a kind of oath written in blood, that the president would not call for ratification during the election season. This the White House refused to do.

The idea that a group of U.S. senators would attempt to force the president to seal his lips like some small-time gangster seems ludicrous, until you realize that a fair number of senators consider Clinton a slippery and perfidious fast-shuffle artist who disgraced his office, who should have been removed last February and who could not be trusted to keep his word.

The depth of antipathy among Senate Republicans toward Clinton, however, is not restricted to just a small group of extremists. If that were the case, many more Republicans might have crossed over to support ratification. And their steadfastness in opposition was not simply a gesture of obedience to party leaders. For just as personal animosity poisoned the relationship between President Woodrow Wilson and Republican leader Henry Cabot Lodge at the time the Versailles Treaty was submitted to the Senate in 1919, there was throughout the current test-ban debate the stench of old scores being settled. Having known from the very outset of the Senate impeachment trial that Clinton would evade expulsion from office, many Republican senators decided to lie in wait and ambush him on a vote that was of great personal importance to him and to the achievement of his often-expressed goal to leave behind a legacy of accomplishment.

In the recrimination that began even before the Senate voted, White House aides ungenerously pointed an accusing finger at Senate Democrats for dropping the ball on the treaty. Such charges might even set a few Democratic senators wondering about the man they worked so hard to preserve in office.