Gangsta GOP

Impeachment is only the latest outrage

America has been asleep. The partisan vote by the House of Representatives to impeach President Clinton is not a political aberration: it's business as usual. Ever since Clinton was elected, Republicans seditiously have tried to undermine his mandate. Their methods have not been dramatic. In fact, at a glance they appear to be the dreary stuff of legislative procedure. But closer scrutiny reveals an unprecedented, arguably counterrevolutionary move to thwart the will of the electorate and ultimately destroy the Clinton presidency. Now the GOP is a Senate vote away from achieving its goal.

Here's the history:

The night Clinton was elected in 1992, then-Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole vowed to use the filibuster to torpedo major presidential initiatives. He kept his word. Throughout 1993 and 1994, when the White House enjoyed a Democratic majority on Capitol Hill, repeated GOP filibusters -- or the threat of them -- foiled the White House at every turn. In modern memory, the filibuster is best remembered as the last-ditch device employed by Southern Democrats hell-bent on killing civil-rights legislation. Those eloquent old racists would take to the floor and stop all business until the measure under consideration died a natural death. By frequently resorting to this tactic, Senate Republicans effectively rewrote the Constitution: whereas it takes a simple majority of 51 to pass a bill, it takes 60 votes to end a filibuster. Yet few noticed that the last resort of the mossbacks had become standard operating procedure for the well-manicured legions of the post-Reagan/Bush GOP. Even fewer cared.

That was not the case in 1995, however, when the House and Senate ganged up on Clinton in an attempt to repudiate his program and forced the national government to shut down. It was an act of irresponsibility that may be unrivaled in our history. This time, the usually disengaged public revolted and the Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, retreated.

But the Republicans had had their ultimate agent of destruction -- Ken Starr -- in place since 1994. With the help of Jesse Helms, the Republicans removed Robert Fiske, a moderate and independent member of the GOP, as Whitewater investigator and replaced him with Starr, who was unconscionably close to Clinton's enemies and had consorted with the legal team representing Paula Jones. No legislative party concerned with fairness -- or even the appearance of fairness -- would countenance such an act. But the Republicans did. It's well known that Starr failed to turn up any evidence of illegal acts in the controversies he investigated. But he did uncover a sordid extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky that has provoked the constitutional showdown we face today.

Since Starr delivered his smutty report to the House Judiciary Committee, the Republicans have continued to act as if they alone define the public good. In considering the weightiest of constitutional questions -- the removal from office of a twice-elected and still-popular president -- the GOP denied the House a chance to vote to censure Clinton, which would clearly have passed with broad bipartisan support. Instead, we have impeachment. This is a stain that will shame the Republicans for years to come, just as Clinton's conduct will shame him.

And what of those who have brought us to this point? Consider Clinton's comrades in adultery: House judiciary chief Henry Hyde, who in defending Oliver North and Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal said that lying under certain circumstances was tolerable, and who in defending a fellow House member accused of sleeping with a 17-year-old female page asked his colleagues to condemn the sin, but forgive the sinner. Hyde is singing a different tune today.

And then there is the soon-to-be-departing Bob Livingston, whose sense of history is as screwy as Clinton's personal life. Livingston is the man who thinks that Nixon was forced to resign because he covered up a crime he didn't commit. His less rabid colleagues have no doubt informed him by now that Nixon not only covered up the Watergate break-in, he ordered it -- and a host of other illegal activities.

That some in the House believe Clinton should have been impeached is a reasonable proposition. That the majority of the body was denied the chance to consider censure -- especially by the likes of Hyde and Livingston -- is an outrage.

For six years the Republicans have employed bully-boy tactics that flout the sense of fair play so essential to our system. In a democracy, conflict is a given. Because fights between competing visions are fierce, those fights have traditionally been governed by commonly accepted rules. By rewriting the rules, Republicans have tried to rewrite the Constitution. Judging by the polls, the GOP has been damaged by these tactics. Perhaps the public is waking up.

As this matter moves to the Senate, the cocksure Republican Party might do well to remember the words of Judge Learned Hand. "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias."

The spirit of this nation requires the Senate to weigh the will of the majority, which favors censuring Clinton's behavior --not removing the president from office.

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