Sunday, December 13, 1998

Clinton guilty of betraying public's trust

The White House, whose impeachment defense of President Clinton sometimes seemed to trivialize the charges against him, got serious the other day when Charles Ruff addressed the House Judiciary Committee, arguing that the House should not vote to impeach and put the nation through the agony of a Senate trial.

While Ruff was short of convincing in some of what he said, he did not behave as if it were somehow silly to think that the president committed perjury or as if the act of perjury is of no moment. His argument was that the president himself thought he was being evasive, not dishonest, that nothing he did actually subverted the government and that House members should regard impeachment as more than an indictment.

According to the White House counsel, members of the House should vote for articles of impeachment only if they were convinced the president has committed crimes serious enough to convict him in the Senate and overturn the 1996 election.

There are legitimate responses to all these points. It's hard to believe, for instance, that the president did not recognize his own lies as lies. Perjury by the chief executive of the land, Republicans on the committee maintain, is a subversion of the legal system. While Ruff would not say he thought so, Clinton committed perjury. One view is that the House therefore has no option but to impeach and that its members should not concern themselves with the ugliness of a Senate trial or the possible national disruption of expelling the president.

Certainly, no blame should attach to anyone voting for impeachment, for impeachment is a way of saying loudly and unmistakably that the president's actions constituted an utterly dismaying betrayal of his trust. The public, however, continues to support the president in large numbers nationwide, meaning the Senate will not convict and that a conviction, if it did happen, would cause even more grief and havoc throughout the land than that betrayal already has.