Archive [February 1999]

As I go to press, the oh-so-wise and astute New York Times editorial writers are once again giving Unites States Senators their marching orders. The Times declares that the Senate “must act” to “regain control of an impeachment trial that has been improperly and dangerously manipulated by the House prosecution managers … [The Senate’s] duty now is to restrain the zealous House prosecutors…”

This is a familiar slander, ladies and gentlemen, against the United States House of Representatives, and especially against the 13 chosen — according to Constitutional procedure — to prosecute the case against William Jefferson Clinton.

“That herd of managers from the House,” sneered Eleanor Clift on “The McLaughlin Group,” “frankly all they were missing was white sheets. They’re like night riders.”

The race card is always at the ready with this crowd. Eleanor’s fellow traveler Betty Friedan airily blamed impeachment on “a bunch of dirty old white men in Congress.” Because “even if he [Clinton] did what he’s alleged to have done, what’s the big deal?”

On cue, CBS News correspondent Phil Jones chimed in: “All 13 [managers] are white. All 13 are males. All 13 are Christians. All 13 are lawyers and 8 have been prosecutors. The average age is 52. With such striking similarities, it’s not surprising that many Democrats believe that these are conservative zealots out to get the President.”

Not surprising at all, in the echo chamber that passes for liberalism today. “The notion of 13 white males going over to prosecute a case is something you would not see in the real world,” announced Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D, MA), in a burst of originality. “The fact that they’re all conservative Republican House members speaks volumes about the case that they have.” And the fact that the left believes the race or religion of the prosecutors somehow cancels out Presidential crimes speaks volumes about the case they have.

“I hope most Americans took a close look at that Republican phalanx on the House Judiciary Committee,” writes columnist Carl Rowan, “That GOP gang looked and sounded like every White Citizens Council gathering that I saw in the South circa 1955.” Hate speech at its finest, folks.

But not every Democrat critic plays the race card. Former KKK member Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV) bemoaned: “The House has fallen into the black pit of partisan self-indulgence.” He was playing the partisan card. Accusations of “partisan unfairness” have become standard practice whenever a Democrat catches a Republican in the act of breathing. Naturally, Sen. Byrd and the rest of the august body (as the Senate calls itself) are deathly afraid that the horrible partisan poison from the House might seep into and infect the pristine and non-partisan/bi-partisan Senate.

When the House managers found a way to interview Monica Lewinsky after Henry Hyde quietly obtained a court order through the auspices of Ken Starr, Democrats shrieked at the re-emergence of ugly Republican partisanship. “It is mind-boggling, absolutely mind-boggling,” complained Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D, VT). He couldn’t figure out “why they would do anything that stupid. All I can think of is that they’re losing it.” Leahy told The Washington Post: “It’s almost as though the House wants to get the Senate into the same kind of mistakes they made.” What mistakes? You mean voting against Bill Clinton? Oh, no!

Sen. Tom Harkin (D, IA) cut to the chase on “Fox News Sunday” when he called the House case “a pile of dung.” He meant that in an impartial way, of course.

“When the House Republicans went crazy and indulged their deepest, darkest fantasies by impeaching President Clinton,” wrote Dick Morris, “the Senate Republicans received the resulting articles of impeachment with distinctly limited enthusiasm. They felt a bit like parents having to pay for the accident their teenager got into with the family car over the weekend.”

Morris is not blowing smoke. “They [Senate Republican leaders] didn’t just want us to be brief,” one senior House manager told Robert Novak. “They wanted us gone.” Which is why, as Novak reports, procedurally “the Senate deck was stacked against the 13-member House team.”

This notion that the dreadful, partisan House of Representatives has to be somehow “redeemed” by the glorious, oh-so-dignified Senate must be put to rest. The truth is, the Senate would be wise to emulate the brilliance of the House.

I am so sick of the Republicans in the House, the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, the Republican House managers prosecuting the impeachment case before the Senate, being smeared and impugned as extremist hatemongers. It has been a lie all along.

The Republicans were never out-of-control extremists. This cliché of the rabid Republican ayatollahs in the House is a total creation of the liberal imagination. Anyone who watched the proceedings in the House saw that Republican Members were thoughtful, civil, decorous. I was proud of every one of them. It was the Democrats who fit the description of partisan zealots. Can you say John Conyers? Maxine Waters? Barney Frank? Jerrold Nadler? Sheila Jackson Lee? Robert Wexler?

Lifelong Democrat Jerome Zeifman, who served as chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the Nixon impeachment proceedings, writes: “During the recent impeachment debate, I heard not one rancorous or mean-spirited word from Henry Hyde or Bob Barr — or from any other Republican. In contrast, all of the partisan hate language came from ‘new’ Democrats. I am appalled by the incessant lashing by Democrats of supporters of impeachment as ‘extremists’ (the same word we use for Saddam Hussein) and ‘radical right-wingers.’ Even in the face of these epithets, the Republicans quite properly refrain from such equivalent accusations.”

Zeifman asks, “Is there now no voice among the ‘New Democrats’ that will speak out to denounce the hate-mongering of the likes of Dershowitz, Baldwin and Carville?”

The question answers itself. No elected Democrat is at all bothered by Dershowitz’s ubiquitous false accusations of racism. No elected Democrat has decried Carville’s “waging a war of retribution” against all conservative Republicans. And if any elected Democrat has spoken out against actor Alec Baldwin’s call for the death by stoning of Henry Hyde and his family, I haven’t heard about it. (Baldwin was only joking, he says.)

Despite all this — despite all this, my friends — the House Republicans went to the mat. Near-universal media condemnation. Threats of blackmail from Bill Clinton’s favorite pornographer, Larry Flynt. Little public support.

Many in the press are bewildered: “Why are they doing this?” “Why are they doing this?” “What drives the Republicans?” “What on earth possesses them to go against the polls??” Note the way an Associated Press wire story frames it:

[O]n the Senate floor, Hyde responded to a question posed to him with a ringing defense of the effort he is leading to convict Clinton and remove him from office. “There are issues of transcendent importance that you have to be willing to lose your office over,” he said. “I can think of several that I’m willing to lose my office over. Abortion is one. National defense is another. Strengthening, not emasculating the concept of ‘equal justice under law’ is a third,” he added. In a Time/CNN poll released Saturday, 54 percent said they disapprove of how Republicans in the Senate are handling the impeachment trial…

Sheesh! Good thing we’re not putting “equal justice under law” to a plebiscite. But the point is, Republicans do x with regard to impeachment; Americans disapprove. Republicans say y with regard to impeachment; the public disagrees. The issue has cost the party dearly — in seats and public standing. Not to mention two Speakers of the House. It has been a total political loser for the Republicans.

And yet, the House has pressed on. Manager Steve Chabot (R, OH) credits Henry Hyde: “He’s an anchor for all of us … We’ve not really ever wavered or been scared.” Rep. Lindsey Graham (R, SC) agrees: “He [Hyde] believes this President trashed the rule of law, and he’s unshakable that this case be heard. He’s always been our compass.”

Hyde himself explained it like this on the Senate floor: “Despite all the polls and the hostile editorials, America is hungry for people who believe in something. You may disagree with us, but we believe in something.”

Which is why the opposition is in a constant state of bewilderment.

When Sen. Byrd announced that he would offer the motion to dismiss the case, Hyde went right back at the Senators: “I know, oh, do I know what an annoyance we are in the bosom of this great body, but we are a constitutional annoyance. And I remind you of that fact.”

Of course, unbeknownst to his audience, he had already quietly check-mated them with a letter to Ken Starr which would result in an interview with Monica.

What a surprise Henry Hyde has turned out to be for the Democrats. He was totally underestimated by the White House — and thus the only Republican able to consistently outmaneuver them. They were all disarmed, according to a New York Times profile, at the beginning: “Good old Henry, whispered the Democrats, confident that the famously fair-minded and genteel gentleman from Illinois would keep the real partisans in check. Let the hard-liners howl at the moon, the thinking went. Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia could hold his breath until he turned purple but, thank God, Henry Hyde was the man in charge.”

The Democrats had not anticipated that when Bill Clinton sent back his in-your-face 81 nonresponses to the Judiciary Committee’s questions, that Henry would say in a meeting of fellow Republicans: “Boys, I don’t see what choice we have now.” And the course was set.

Thank God, Henry Hyde was the man in charge.

The White House was also reported to have misjudged the 13 House prosecutors, according to a British publication, The Independent:

After the “managers” from the House of Representatives wrapped up the case against President Clinton … the White House and the Senate were said to have been surprised by the quality of the presentation … (T]hey had given highly professional and effective performances. They had appeared confident and composed … The angry, argumentative politicians of the House judiciary committees impeachment hearings last year transformed themselves…

In other words, the White House had been taken in by its own spin, dismissing the Republicans as right-wing nuts unworthy of attention or respect. A lethal error.

So when the GOP managers were put in a new context, addressing the Senators without the interruptions and tantrums from food-fighting Congressional Democrats, Senators were forced to actually listen.

At this writing, the outcome remains uncertain. The media is at a near-hysterical pitch, declaring: “It’s over.” By the time you read this, the fight may well be finished. But I tell you, no matter what the end result, we have seen true heroism. Republicans in the House, led by a true American giant, Henry Hyde, acquitted themselves with honor.

It was a performance that inspired lead counsel David Schippers. According to a report in National Review: “[Schippers] was amazed that Republicans were determined to press on ‘in the face of the clobbering at the ballot box, the Speaker’s resigning, and talk that chances for 2000 were down the toilet.’ Says Schippers, ‘I went back to my group [of prosecutors] and told them, “We are working for the most courageous people I’ve ever met, who are determined to do their duty, and, by God, we’re going to do it with them.’” He adds, ‘The courage of those members is so encouraging when you think of the future of the country. I think that history will be kind to the House Committee, the Republican side’ — which displayed ‘raw courage.’”

As Henry Hyde has declared: “There’s no political profit in this.” He applauds the House managers as his “intrepid colleagues who have marched into the jaws of death, really, political death.”

All to preserve a precious American birthright: EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.