The debate—mostly in two- or four-minute snippets from both sides—was especially bitter and angry. Members of Congress are used to fighting on the merits of issues, but they place a special value on procedural fairness. The failure of the House leadership to allow a vote on censure—to permit a “substitute,” in the congressional argot—was especially galling. The House minority always received a vote on a substitute, but DeLay had shut down this option, and had made sure the Democrats knew it. Again, no one said anything especially memorable through twelve long hours of debate on Friday, and no one expected anything more in the moments leading up to the vote on Saturday.
When Bob Livingston rose to speak on Saturday morning, he hadn’t given any sign that his words would differ much from those of any other impeachment supporter. The floor was not even half filled. Given his stature, he was allowed more time than most of the other members, but he ambled through the early part of his remarks, which were mostly devoted to defending the decision to take the vote while American bombers were still in harm’s way.
“But to the president I would say:
“Sir, you have done great damage to this nation over this past year, and while your defenders are contending that further impeachment proceedings would only protract and exacerbate the damage to this country, I say that you have the power to terminate that damage.…”
This caused a stirring. People could tell what was coming next. On the Democratic side, John Conyers, Abbe Lowell, and Maxine Waters, who were seated together in front, snapped their heads forward.
“You, sir, may resign your post,” Livingston continued, and the reaction was swift. Waters vaulted out of her chair, pointed at Livingston, and shouted, “You resign! You resign!” Boos cascaded down from other Democrats.
Livingston raised his hand for quiet. “And I can only challenge you in such fashion if I am willing to heed my own words,” he said, and the room again fell silent.
“To my colleagues, my friends, and most especially my wife and family, I have hurt you all deeply, and I beg your forgiveness.
“I was prepared to lead our narrow majority as speaker, and I believe I had it in me to do a fine job. But I cannot do that job or be the kind of leader that I would like to be under current circumstances.…”
Now there was anger, except from the other side. Republicans were shouting at Democrats, “Are you fucking happy?” “Is this what you motherfuckers wanted?” Even House veterans could not recall an uglier, or more surprising, turn of events. Peter King, the Republican impeachment opponent, who was on the floor at the time, recalled later that the moment reminded him of when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald—the sense of national vertigo, of events spinning out of control.
“… I will not stand for speaker on January 6 …” Livingston continued through the buzz around him. “I thank my wife most especially for standing by me. I love her very much.
“God bless America.”
Standing ovations notwithstanding, Livingston’s admission of adultery had cost him support among hard-core Republicans—“the perfection caucus,” as they were sometimes called. If Livingston lost only half a dozen Republican votes, as he well might have, he could not have won the speaker-ship. The Louisianan bowed to the inevitable.
Moments after Livingston finished his remarks, Richard Gephardt came to the floor and uttered a heartfelt invitation to his adversary to change his mind. “I believe his decision to retire is a terrible capitulation to the negative forces that are consuming our political system and our country,” Gephardt said. “We are now rapidly descending into a politics where life imitates farce, fratricide dominates our public debate, and America is held hostage to tactics of smear and fear.” In this, the Democratic leader was wrong. The politics were already there.
In one respect, Livingston’s announcement achieved the impossible: it rendered the impeachment of the president an anticlimax. Article one, perjury in the grand jury, passed by 228 to 206. For all the talk about party defections, only five Democrats voted for impeachment and five Republicans against it. Lindsey Graham’s opposition to article two, perjury in the deposition, made it a safe way for Republicans to appear reasonable, so twenty-eight members voted with the Democrats. The article lost, 229 to 205. Article three, obstruction of justice, passed by just 221 to 212. (If the vote on this article had been delayed until January, when the Democrats would have five more seats, it almost certainly would have lost.) The garbled article four, ultimately based on Clinton’s written answers to the Judiciary Committee, failed by a wide margin, 285 to 148.
As ever, the great fear of people around Clinton was that there would be a stampede of Democrats calling for his ouster. So in the days leading up to the inevitable, the president’s advisers gently encouraged House members to make a postimpeachment show of support. Immediately after the vote, about fifty Democrats walked down the great steps of the Capitol and into buses that were waiting for them.
Clinton was subdued, almost embarrassed, on meeting the delegation from Capitol Hill. But the Democrats weren’t faking their outrage at the proceedings that had just ended, and soon the president was savoring their encouragement. In a few moments, as Clinton chatted in the East Room, his spirits began to revive, and then, standing around with a group of members and staffers, the president said, “Anybody want to hear a dirty joke?”
It was suddenly very, very quiet.
There’s this guy, Clinton recounted, and he’s caught on a cliff in a storm. As the wind and rain rages around him, he grabs on to a branch and he’s just about to fall off the cliff when he looks up and says, “Why me, God?”
And God looks down on him and says, “I just don’t like you.”
There was nothing dirty about the joke, and Clinton told it often, once even at a press conference. It is always possible to read too much into a joke, but one can see Clinton’s attitude toward the entire swirling scandal contained in this little story. Clinton saw little difference between the man on the cliff, Richard Jewell, and himself—all victims of forces beyond their control. To be sure, he will be remembered as the target of an unwise and unfair impeachment proceeding. But just as certainly, history will haunt Clinton for his own role in this political apocalypse, and for that, despite his best efforts, this president can blame only himself.
20
These Culture Wars
The trial of the president in the Senate had relatively little to do with Clinton himself. With only fifty-five Republicans sitting in the upper chamber, there was never any real chance that the president’s accusers could muster the two-thirds vote—sixty-seven senators—necessary to remove him from office. Clinton’s poll ratings had actually improved during the undignified proceedings in the House of Representatives, so it was inconceivable that all the Republicans plus twelve Democrats would vote for Clinton’s ouster. Barring sensational new disclosures—which remained, as ever, the great Republican hope—the president’s job was safe.
Rather, the real drama of the Senate trial concerned the efforts of all the participants to avoid making bad situations worse. The Lewinsky story had diminished everyone it touched. The scandal had indirectly cost two speakers of the House their jobs, driven the Republican Party to new depths of unpopularity, and, of course, led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment. In light of this sorry history, senators were united as they prepared to take up their constitutional duty. They wanted the whole thing to … just go away.
For a brief moment, Trent Lott tried to makes those wishes come true. The former Ole Miss cheerleader had worked his way through the ranks in Washington, as a congressional aide, a congressman for sixteen years, a senator for ten more, and majority leader since 1996. Like many Republican senators who had come up through the House, Lott was a strong conservative and resolute partisan. But he had been forced to adapt to his new surroundings. Unlike most House members, who effectively run unopposed, all senators run statewide, often in competitive races. They ignore public opinion at their peril. Lott didn’
t like Clinton any better than his House colleagues, but he knew a losing fight when he saw one.
Lott spent much of the Christmas break on the telephone with his Republican colleagues in the Senate, and he learned that they viewed the approaching trial with dread. This round of phone calls yielded a plan bearing the name of Slade Gorton, a Republican from Washington State, and Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat. Under their scenario, which was leaked around Christmas, the Senate would hear opening statements and then take a preliminary vote. If none of the three articles drew the support of two-thirds of the senators—as, surely, none would—then the trial would end, without the managers having called a single witness. It was a way of shuffling the impeachment controversy out the door of the Senate in about week.
Hyde’s chief aide, Tom Mooney, had never seen his boss so angry. Gorton-Lieberman was a slap in the face, Hyde said, a sign of disrespect to the entire House. Like many veteran House members, Hyde resented the institutional condescension of the senators, who regarded their House counterparts in both parties as unreflective zealots, and none too bright either. But Hyde was damned if he was going to let those arrogant bastards push impeachment under the rug. Hyde ordered Mooney to write Lott a stinging letter to this effect, which they would promptly release to the press. In the key passage of the letter, dated December 30, 1998, Hyde used the patronizing tone that he expected from senators. “As you know, the constitutional duty of the House of Representatives as the accusatory body differs greatly from the Senate’s constitutional duty as an adjudicatory body,” Hyde instructed. “As the entity granted the sole power to try an impeachment—i.e., to determine the guilt or innocence of President Clinton—the Senate should hear from live witnesses.” This intraparty dispute among Republicans formed the core drama of the Senate trial: Hyde and his band of true-believing managers against Lott and his election-minded colleagues.
Hyde’s complaints about witnesses enraged senators in both parties. As they all knew, “live witnesses” in the context of this trial meant Monica Lewinsky. Given the nature of the charges, for her testimony to be at all meaningful, Lewinsky would have to provide anatomical details of her encounters with the president. Paul Sarbanes, the Maryland Democrat who, like Lott, had served on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate, made the point repeatedly during his party’s caucuses. “They didn’t call witnesses in the House because they didn’t want to be embarrassed with that kind of testimony,” Sarbanes said. “But now they say that we have to call witnesses? That’s outrageous.”
Sarbanes was exactly right—and many Republicans agreed with him. The Constitution said nothing about how either body should conduct its impeachment inquiry. As Clinton’s enemies always did, Hyde was simply hoping that the drama of live testimony would shake public opinion in a way that the words of the Starr report had not. But Hyde had no right to be sanctimonious about the rights of the House of Representatives. This was a political process, and just as he was representing the desires of the Republican base, Lott was speaking for the broader interests of the party. The Constitution, which Hyde invoked so promiscuously throughout this process, had nothing to say about whether Lewinsky should recite her tale from the well of the Senate.
The trial was scheduled to begin on Thursday, January 7, but no one had any clear idea how it would unfold. In a characteristic example of his passive management style, Hyde had essentially allowed any Judiciary Republican who wanted the assignment to become a “manager,” or prosecutor, on the Senate floor. That left him with an unmanageable group of thirteen, all of whom had to be given something to do. Over the New Year’s weekend, Hyde asked three of the more experienced prosecutors on the panel, Rogan, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, and Ed Bryant of Tennessee, to draw up a battle plan for a full-fledged trial. Rogan took the lead and came up with fifteen to twenty witnesses he regarded as essential. A couple of days before the trial was to begin, Lott came to the managers’ headquarters to talk about plans for the trial.
In deference to Hyde’s protests, Lott didn’t push Gorton-Lieberman, but he didn’t promise live witnesses, either. Lott chose a young first-term Republican senator named Rick Santorum, a former House member from Pennsylvania, as his unofficial deputy in dealing with Hyde and the managers. You know these people, Lott suggested to Santorum, maybe you can talk some sense to them. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Lott’s choice of Santorum succeeded only in uniting the managers in contempt for their former colleague.
“So,” Lott said to the managers, “how many witnesses do you need?”
Rogan explained his plan and mentioned the number twenty. Lott blanched.
“That’s too many,” the majority leader said. “How many do you really need?”
Thus began a haggling process that lasted more than a month. On the surface, it appeared that Lott and the Senate completely controlled the outcome, but the managers weren’t without political muscle. From that first day, several of them, including Rogan and Chris Cannon of Utah, made clear that they would quit as managers rather than participate in a trial that gave them no chance to win. Several times in the next month the managers came close to a mass resignation. As the managers knew, such an exodus would have been a disaster for Lott—the nominal leader of the Republican Party—so the majority leader avoided categorical commitments of any kind. On a deeper level, this pas de deux over witnesses revealed what a sham the trial was. Both sides—Lott and his people and Hyde and his—paid far more attention to the number of witnesses than to the substance of what any of them might say.
“Gentlemen, shall we?” said Ed Bryant.
Shortly before ten on January 7, the House manager from Tennessee asked his fellow managers to bow their heads in prayer. This had become a tradition of sorts for the Republicans on Judiciary. Before they voted the articles in the committee, and before the full House began its impeachment debate, Bryant had led the group in asking God’s help. (“Gentlemen” was apt; the thirteen managers were all male.)
With that, Hyde directed the group in a solemn procession from the House to the Senate side of the Capitol. In this the managers were following the precedent laid down in the trial of Andrew Johnson in 1868. Lott was a stickler for tradition, and he directed his staff to choreograph the trial in line with the historical record. These solemn formalities, including an honor guard of senators for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who presided, pleased Lott’s tradition-minded colleagues but also sent a message to the public. The Senate believed in fairness and order. In other words, the Senate wasn’t the House. (The managers, for example, had asked to sit to Rehnquist’s left, in front of the Republican senators. Lott refused, reminding them that the managers in the Johnson trial had sat on the other side. As a result, the managers spent the entire trial under the grumpy stares of some of Clinton’s biggest supporters, like Barbara Boxer of California and Charles Schumer of New York, who happened to sit up front.)
January 7 marked only a ceremonial start to the trial, with a reading of the charges by Hyde and then a cavalcade of senators to sign a book recording their roles as “jurors.” They were each presented with a special pen for the occasion, but it somehow fit the seedy nature of the inquiry that the writing instruments were mistakenly imprinted with the words “Untied States Senate.” With those brief formalities completed, the full complement of one hundred senators—who, in ordinary circumstances, rarely gathered together—found themselves assembled with little to do. The senators began chatting with one another and the idea took hold that they should meet informally, to try to set some ground rules for the trial.
Lott and Daschle agreed that the full Senate should march down the hall to the Old Senate Chamber. Some Democrats were reluctant. The image of impeachment as a partisan donnybrook had served the party well in the House. But “winning by losing” wasn’t going to work in the Senate. The institutional self-image of the Senate called for a more dignified resolution, and even most Senate Democrats thought a little high-mindedness wouldn’t hurt their
cause—or the president’s.
So, the following morning, the one hundred senators gathered in the room that had last been used for official business in 1859. Lott and Daschle presided jointly, and they began by recognizing Robert Byrd, the eighty-one-year-old West Virginia Democrat who was second in seniority to Strom Thurmond. Byrd had built his career as the custodian of the Senate’s traditions, writing much-admired if little-read histories of the place. “The House has fallen into the black pit of partisan self-indulgence,” he said. “The Senate is teetering on the brink of the same black pit.”
Byrd had one suggestion at the outset. “We can start by disdaining any more of the salacious muck which has already soiled the gowns of too many,” he said. Translated from Byrd’s fussy diction, this was actually an important substantive point. Since the case against Clinton was based on “salacious muck,” Byrd was obviously hoping that the gory details—and Monica Lewinsky—would be kept off the Senate floor.
Most of the comments followed in this vein—paeans to the glories of the Senate and attacks on the predations of the House. On the critical point of contention, the issue of live witnesses, the group quickly agreed on a most Senate-like solution: to put the decision off. They would allow the trial to start with opening statements from both sides, then allow the senators to ask questions of the lawyers, and only then would they turn to a vote on whether to allow witnesses. They were giving life to a favorite expression on Capitol Hill: “Let’s see how it plays out.” Democrats were betting that the managers would fail to shift the momentum, and Republicans were hoping they could play statesman without too much angering their political base.
A Vast Conspiracy Page 48