Impeachment: The Wrong Way Out

In September, we called for President Clinton to step down, to make the choice to resign. We had lost our confidence in Clinton's ability to carry out his agenda, and we were disgusted with the way he had blatantly and repeatedly lied to us. Today, however, the time has come to confront the reality of impeachment. This Thursday, the House of Representatives will vote on four articles of impeachment approved last week by the Judiciary Committee--two counts of perjury, one count of obstruction of justice and one count of abuse of power.

The oppressive partisanship that dominated the Starr investigation and infected the Judiciary Committee has turned the investigation of the President into a rancorous partisan fight. If it ever was one, this investigation is no longer a search for truth.

What President Clinton did, lie under oath in a civil trial, was wrong; it would likely qualify as perjury in a criminal trial. But impeachment is not a criminal proceeding. It is a political process meant to remove a President guilty only of high crimes and misdemeanors. And Clinton's pathetic dalliance with an intern, even if he lied about it, does not warrant impeachment--either in our eyes or in the eyes of the American people who twice elected him to the presidency.

If the House decides to impeach the President on Thursday, a political majority which despises Bill Clinton and wants to remove him from office at any cost will have prevailed, at the expense of the integrity of the Constitution. House Republicans know that the Senate will likely not convict Bill Clinton if the case goes to trial. Nevertheless, they would use the constitutional procedure of impeachment as a substitute for censure. This amounts to a grave abuse of their power.

Moreover, for the House to occasion a trial in which Monica S. Lewinsky, Linda Tripp and other specious characters would take the stand in front of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist would be to drag this nation, weary of scandal and partisan posturing, through the mud for much of 1999.

President Clinton ought to be punished for all he has done--for accepting the advances of a 21-year-old intern, cheating on his wife in the Oval Office, lying under oath, lying to the American people. But impeachment is simply an inappropriate response; it is too grave an action for so base a trail of indiscretions.

The only sensible alternative, which House Speaker-elect Robert L. Livingston has irresponsibly vowed to block from coming to a vote, is censure. Moderate Republicans hold the key to rejecting the articles of impeachment and pressuring Livingston to allow censure to come to the floor. To impeach Clinton this week would be to belittle the awesome mechanism our Founders provided for the removal of our most powerful officer.