The Senate's Duty

Nearly a year after the crude details of President Clinton's affair with Monica S. Lewinsky first surfaced in the media, the president has been impeached and the Senate is poised to begin a presidential trial for the second time in our history. The farce that began last January has sickened the nation: From the president's stone-faced lying on television to Kenneth W. Starr's viciously partisan inquisition to the sanctimonious hypocrisy of the Republican leadership, there are no heroes in this sorry episode in our nation's history.

The overwhelming majority of American citizens did not believe the president should be impeached; legal scholars and historians pleaded with the House not to lower the standards of impeachment to satiate their hatred for the president and his actions. But the Republican vendetta could not be derailed.

Now the stakes are at their highest. Clinton is one step from being removed; his fate is in the hands of 100 Senators, whom Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist is due to swear in as jurors tomorrow.

While we of course do not approve of the president's actions, we did not believe they merited his impeachment and we have no doubt that they do not now warrant his removal from office. The allegations in the articles of impeachment are laughably weak. The House impeached the president for perjury without specifying how he perjured himself; it accused him of obstruction of justice based on a selective reading of conflicting testimony garnered by the independent counsel.

Using the mechanism of impeachment to register disgust with the president's actions was grievously wrong. For the lame-duck House Republican leadership of the last Congress to have pushed through these articles--to have turned a crime so low ordinary Americans would never be prosecuted for it into a "high crime" on par with treason--is an abuse of their constitutional power voters should not soon forget.

At this point, the start of a trial before the Senate seems inevitable. The proposal by Sens. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) to allow a preliminary vote on the merit of the charges against the president before the commencement of trial proceedings does not appear likely to succeed. Yet we hope the Senate will vote to end the trial soon after it has begun, whether by a motion to dismiss the charges or, if necessary, a compromise censure resolution.

But any compromise must be forged carefully. Any resolution of this mess that lends legitimacy to the articles of impeachment would be a disservice to the nation. Instead, in dismissing the trial quickly, the Senate should make a strong statement: "High crimes and misdemeanors" is not a frivolous standard which the House can debase to its pleasing.

We hope that in the coming days the Senate will act more responsibly than the House did in December, and that our elected representatives will get back to substantive business.