Monday, December 14, 1998

House GOP playing Wile E. Coyote

By Donald Kaul

The impeachment hearings have been truly bizarre, strange even by Washington’s standards. The panel, charged with the solemn responsibility of deciding whether we should impeach the president of the United States, didn’t call any material witnesses, required the president’s lawyers to defend him before they knew what the charges were and paid attention neither to the testimony of witnesses nor each other. Who’s writing this script, Lewis Carroll?

Perhaps the most maddening aspect was the lack of real argument over differences of opinion; they just kept talking past each other. I thought if I heard Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina laboriously ask one more witness whether he had any new facts in the case to offer (as if this case were about facts), I’d have to put a boot through the TV.

Surely we deserved something better than this, something that treated the impeachment of a twice-elected president as a grave matter, rather than an excuse for reciting partisan catechisms.

The Judiciary Committee has reported out articles of impeachment over the weekend, and they will go to the full House for a vote. Nothing is for sure, but it begins to look as though the House might actually impeach the president.

I never thought it would come to that. It seemed to me the things he was charged with did not rise to the exalted level of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and that, in any case, “the People’s House” would not dare vote to remove so popular a president. I was wrong.

There is a hard-core group of Republicans — and it’s probably a majority within the party — that is determined to destroy Bill Clinton, come hell or high water, even if it means thwarting the will of the people. Even if it means damaging the economy. Even if it means losing the presidency in 2000.

In circumstances like these, one might expect the speaker of the House, the leader of his party, to exert a calming influence. Unfortunately the speaker at the moment, Newt Gingrich, has no interest in saving his party’s bacon, since the party rewarded his previous leadership by throwing him out of office for the coming year. The speaker-to-be, Robert Livingston, has not yet taken the wheel and is reluctant to try to run things until he does.

Thus leadership in the matter has fallen into the willing hands of Tom DeLay, a right-wing zealot who honed his political skills while working as a pest exterminator in Texas. DeLay, the House whip, has artfully moved his colleagues away from a resolution of censure that many prefer, toward impeachment, which will delight his Christian right supporters.

Odd, isn’t it, that we should arrive at the very pinnacle of world power at a time when we are led by a president who is not an adult and a Congress that, while humorless, is not serious.

At one time I thought I might learn to enjoy the comedy of the proceedings, particularly the way the Republicans keep acting out the part of Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon. They lay these careful traps to do in the president, each one calculated to bring him down. First they took the extraordinary step of releasing the video of Clinton’s grand jury testimony; that was supposed to convince people that he should be stoned from office. It didn’t.

The Tripp tapes were released to show what innocent victims Tripp and Lewinsky were at the hands of the big, bad president. Not.

The Starr referral, Starr’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee, Clinton’s taped testimony in the Paula Jones case — each one was supposed to be the nail that finally sealed the lid on the coffin for Bill Clinton. And after each one, Clinton beep-beeped away, stronger than ever, while the Republicans looked more and more like the old coyote.

But I find I’m enjoying this less and less. The judiciary hearings seemed bleak and more than a little grim to me. It’s hard to accept the fact that my country is being governed by the likes of Bob Barr and Bill McCollum.

It begins to look as though we are going to be treated to the spectacle of the chief justice of the Supreme Court presiding over a U.S. Senate convened to decide the question, in Barney Frank’s words, “What did the President touch and when did he touch it?”

That can’t be what George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of that crowd had in mind.

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.