Saturday, November 14, 1998

'Get Clinton' game keeps backfiring

By Donald Kaul

The Republicans remind me of the drunk in the bar who lost his bet on the Monday Night football game.

"Your team got lucky," he tells the winner. "But I taped the game at home. Let's go watch it. I'll bet you double or nothing they can't do it again."

The Grand Old Party, having all but had its head handed to it in the recent election, largely because of its relentless exploration of President Clinton's sexual habits, is going into instant replay.

A subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee met with Constitutional historians this week to get some perspective on impeachment. While the historians disagreed on whether President Clinton's transgressions reached the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors," the Republicans had no such doubts.

"The evidence before us clearly supports the conclusion that the president is guilty of multiple acts of lying under oath, obstruction of justice and other offenses," said Rep. Charles Canady, a Florida Republican and chairman of the subcommittee. "Such conduct is indeed seriously incompatible with the proper performance of constitutional duties of the presidential office -- namely, the pre-eminent presidential duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, the chairman of the full committee, weighed in with: "I'm frightened for the rule of law. We should have a government of laws and not of men, but we're going in the other direction."

Rep. Bob Inglis, a South Carolina Republican, dripped sarcasm as he rebutted the distinguished (and liberal) historian Arthur Schlesinger's argument that the committee should seek a "sense of proportionality" in judging President Clinton's crimes:

"We should publish in the Federal Register a list of permitted perjuries. Lie if you're the president. Lie in a case involving sex."

Inglis, incidentally, was fresh from losing a Senate race in South Carolina, where he campaigned on a Isn't-Clinton-Terrible? platform. Now, like one of those Japanese soldiers they used to find on deserted islands in the Pacific, in full combat gear and unaware that the war was over and that he'd lost, he stands ready to fight on.

Good for him! I say. Good for all of them. I hope they go on like that for months and months, pillorying Bill Clinton without cease. I hope they extend the hearings and call witness after witness -- Monica, Linda, Paula, Madame Chiang Kai-shek. I hope they spend the next two years proving to the American voter just how unworthy Clinton is. Right up until the next election.

So does Al Gore.

I'm not sure the Democrats will be that lucky. Bob Livingston, the (soon-to-be) new speaker of the House, seems to have a better grasp of the situation than do Judiciary committee members and has indicated impeaching Clinton is not high on his agenda.

Still, the impeachment train is rolling, and it's going to be difficult to disembark without getting hurt. The historians, divided on impeachment itself, were unanimous on one thing: The House has no power to offer any sort of censure of the president, short of impeachment. "It is either impeachment or nothing," one of them said.

This puts House Republicans and some Democrats, many of whom have vilified the president, in a bind. Can they really afford to let this low and cunning fellow off scot-free, to let him thumb his nose at them and laugh derisively? We'll see.

Getting rid of Newt Gingrich and replacing him with a Livingston, a hard-line conservative but one who understands the political art of compromise, is a beginning. We of the press were stunned by it, but I suppose we shouldn't have been. All revolutions have a thermidor and the Republican Revolution proved to be no exception.

A thermidor, in case you were absent from school that day, is, according to the dictionary, "a moderate counterrevolutionary stage of a revolution following an extremist stage, characterized by emphasis on the restoration of order, a relaxation of tensions and some return to patterns of life held to be normal."

In the French revolution, it was marked by the execution of its chief revolutionary, Robespierre. The Republicans made do by deep-sixing Newt, who was as close to a Robespierre as they had.

I'll never know why people think politics is dull.

E-mail Donald Kaul at otcoffee@aol.com or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services. Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611.