Impeachment, Partisanism, and Subversion: A Moral Postscript and Prescript
By James A. Nash
Dr. James A. Nash writes, teaches, lectures, and consults on social and ecological ethics. He is the former Executive Director, and is now a Senior Scholar, of the Churches` Center for Theology and Public Policy in Washington, D.C.]
The impeachment and trial of President Clinton proceed more seemingly impossible things daily than even the Queen in Mice`s Wonderland could imagine before and after breakfast.
But perhaps the most astonishing feature of these events was the breadth and depth of Republican partisanism (and "-ism is the sensible suffix here, since I doubt that this phenomenon can be soundly interpreted except as a doctrinal obsession). The Republican leadership in the House and Senate and the bulk of the party faithful throughout the nation made the legislative removal of the President from office the test of party loyalty and the means to party unity, imposed by party discipline under the threat of party punishments. Conservative advocates, in fact, promised to provide potential Republican dissenters with Right-minded primary opponents. The Hard Right ruled, and even most of the moderates" buckled. Rebels were few in both the House and Senate. Party loyalists, proud of their participation in a righteous cause, now describe themselves as "`the party of principle."
Many citizens, including many Republicans, were properly appalled by this kind and degree of partisan behavior. Frequently the reasons for this feeling have been unclear, more intuited than formulated and developed. But one fundamental reason that many of us have felt deeply merits sharp and bold notice: Partisanism in the efforts to remove an elected officeholder of an opposing party is an attack on the moral foundations of democracy. It is a genuinely subversive act!
This partisan subversion of democracy, not the much-hyped legally unpunished lies and lusts of the President, is the far more destructive precedent and the far more difficult remedial task in this tragic (even when frequently comic) political drama. The trial of the President is long over, but beware: the tribulation of the nation will long continue, particularly as we seek to constrain the vengeful furies, arising on both sides, and to repair the battered infrastructure of our democracy.
That is why we cannot simply bury the agonizing and antagonizing impeachment controversy as a dead issue, and why we need to continue-taking advantage now of some distance in time-to search for the moral lessons in these events. Thus, I offer a postscript, from a political ethics perspective, on part of the significance of what happened, and a prescript suggesting what amendments of our political ways we need now to make.
Those self-stylized people ol principle are certainly right on one point: Whatever else impeachment may be, it is a major moral matter, involving questions of fairness and honesty in the quest of truth and the commonweal. But they are myopically mistaken on another important point: The irresponsible and stupid conduct of the President was not the only moral consideration in this impeachment and trial. The conduct of the majority party in the Congress (not to mention the special prosecutor with a very partisan history) also counted, and often that conduct was infamously dishonest and unfair. It represented the most fearsome of unions: the arrogance of power wedded to the arrogance of righteousness.
In the guise of defending the "rule of law" against a presumed morally corrupt President, House Republican leaders and managers themselves violated many of the ethical elements of that rule, including due process, respect for all the civil rights of the accused, elementary standards of fairness, and the rubrics of sound reasoning. With numbers on their side, the majorities in the judiciary Committee, the House as a whole, and often even the Senate choreographed a model of imperialistic partisanism.
The case against the President turned out to be surprisingly weak and incoherent. Leaving aside the very debatable questions about the gravity of the alleged offenses, lying under oath and concealing evidence (or perhaps more accurately, giving misleading answers to malicious questions that ought never to have been asked, from politically conservative interrogators with the apparent intent to trap or set up the leader of the opposition), the evidence was anything but clear and compelling. It was cloudy, confusing, and sometimes contradictory. Connecting the dots in a supposed pattern of obstruction required great leaps of faith, or the revelatory assurances apparently given to some House managers. The charges did not seem to satisfy any ethically defensible standard of proof, no matter what our feelings or suspicions may be, and I for one had plenty of suspicions and angry feelings about a mess of presidential improprieties. Nevertheless, given a legal system wherein the prosecutors must prove guilt, and given the immense difficulty of showing the legally necessary intent to lie and obstruct justice, the President had a right to the full benefit of the doubt.
The House managers abused not only the rule of law but also the rules of reason. From ambiguous events with two or more plausible interpretations, impeachment managers often presented manufactured "facts" and "incontrovertible proofs." Their arguments featured selective use of evidence, severely stretched inferences, hearsay treated as corroboration, speculative conclusions, and a variety of textbook logical fallacies, from begging the question to post hoc ergo propter hoc. Suspicions were translated into certainties. Wild imaginings worthy of the best conspiratorial theorists were commonplace, especially from the House Judiciary Committee`s most creative fantasizer, Rep. Lindsey Graham.
The managers` arguments, moreover, were buttressed by the banal and rigid moralisms that make ethicists shudder. They ignored the importance of proportionality in weighing and balancing goods and bads, offenses and redresses, claims and consequences. Indeed, the whole impeachment process was a monument to disproportionality. It was a story of extravagant overreaction to acts of over-rated relevance. The Clinton impeachment probably will be remembered as the partisan construction of a traumatic affair of state out of the taints and trinkets from a tacky affair of the heart.
These abuses of rights and reason should not be understood as ordinary advocacy by typical prosecutors. That would be politically and culturally naive. The evident hostility to, even contempt for, the President from most of his accusers points to a deeper problem. One dares not forget that the bulk of House and Senate Republicans, as well as probably all of the House managers and virtually all of the non-governmental organizations advocating impeachment, are staunch ideological foes of the President and his policies. They are ""true believers" in a political philosophy that stresses: a minimal role for the state as an instrument of social policy; a moral atomism that gives excessive preference to individual autonomy over social responsibility; and a set of supposedly "traditional" values that are too often truncated and exclusive. They have opposed the President on most of the major controversies of the time, including abortion rights, gun control, gay rights, health care reform, environmental protections, affirmative action, tax policy, and defense plans. And they have often raged in frustration over the President`s initiatives and his counter-thrusts to their initiatives. For this crowd, Bill Clinton has been a loathsome symbol of evil. Indeed, the symbolic nature of the impeachment struggle must be highlighted in any adequate interpretation, because, as many of us understood almost intuitively and as the national media rarely sensed, much of the anti-Clinton fervor reflected the religious and moral conflicts in a cultural history.
The ideological zeal of these accusers and judges obstructed justice for the President. It belied even the possibility of an impartial judgment, and twisted impeachment into a partisan weapon. From a right angle, impeachment was simply politics by other means. The struggle to evict Clinton was the biggest and best battle yet, but not the last, in the ongoing "cultural wars."
Yet, even if the impeachment process and arguments had been flawlessly fair, partisanism alone, impeaching in the name of party solidarity for a party cause, calls into question the credibility, the integrity, and the legitimacy of that cause. Indeed, the absence of authentic bipartisanship is a prima fade invalidation of that cause, a strong indicator that the cause is ideologically contaminated and thus unjust. Contrary, however, to the misinterpretations of bipartisanship by Chairman Hyde, almost-Speaker Livingston, and Majority Leader Lott, as well as some Democrats, bipartisanship in an impeachment and trial must be much more than civility or the absence of mutual recriminations and inter-party feuds. It also demands inter-party cooperation and compromise in a common cause or, negatively, at least the absence of voting blocs imposed by party discipline. Rendering impartial justice is never fully possible for finite and faulty humans, but it is rendered utterly impossible under such party impositions. Party solidarity to remove an elected officeholder of an opposing party is, on its face, alien to and destructive of democratic government. Again, we need to be reminded that what is legal and constitutional is not necessarily just and prudent.
The legislative impeachment and removal of an elected officeholder are such severe assaults on the core of democracy, respect for the results of free and fair elections, that they cannot be justified in our contemporary democracy without both conclusive evidence of a grievous fault and substantial bipartisan support.
I suggest, as a rule of thumb, a one-fourth threshold: at least one-fourth of the party of the accused must favor ouster, and, in situations where the evidence is reasonably debatable, perhaps at least one-fourth of the opposition party to the accused must also oppose it, in order to overcome suspicions of partisan motivations and manipulations.
Such a threshold seems invaluable as a moral check on the human inclinations of the advantaged to grasp more than their due and to deprive others of their due, and to do so under the self-deception of transcendent impartiality. Otherwise, we may succumb to a majoritarian tyranny, in which the overthrow of the President of an opposing party is accomplished under the camouflage of the rule of law. That is truly a dangerous precedent but one that we almost established.
Some will argue, of course, that both sides were plagued by partisanism. That is not formally true in this case. The efforts to preserve the President in office by Democrats in the Congress and those to remove him by most Republicans do not have the same moral standing. In a democracy; the integrity and stability of the system require a strong presumption for the continuance of a duly elected officeholder until the expiration of his/her term. Some substantial measure of bipartisanship seems to be one essential criterion for rebutting this presumption. Thus, only the attempt to oust the President entails a heavy burden of proof, which is cast in at least grave doubt when the process is as obviously partisan as the recent crusade. For this reason, the stances of the conflicting parties in the Congress cannot be reduced to ethically equivalent partisanism.
More contemporary Republican legislators would have done well to follow the historic example of Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, one of the seven Republican Senators who broke party ranks in 1868 in the trial of President Andrew Johnson. Trumbull found Johnson`s policies to be "distasteful" and calamitous. In fact, he described the President as unfit for that office. Still, contrary to party policy, he courageously admitted that the evidence was not sufficient to show that the President was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. Despite the political bloodlust in his party, he voted not to convict Andrew Johnson. The issue was not a party question,"` he insisted, and thus he refused to "heed the clamor of intemperate zealots who demand the conviction of Andrew Johnson as a test of party faith." Of course, he was shunned and punished by partisans thereafter.
Regrettably, some of those few Republican Representatives and Senators who did likewise can probably anticipate a fate similar to Trumbull`s. Yet, in admiring their decisions or sympathizing with their dilemmas, we must not overlook the important lesson that Trumbull taught: For the sake of our democracy, impeachment must never again be a party question." Indeed, I add, partisanism, "the clamor of intemperate zealots", is itself a corruptive force that must be constrained.
Democracy is a precious but delicate and demanding form of government. It does not happen necessarily or automatically in some political version of the Invisible Hand. It can be damaged or destroyed, even here, without careful and persistent nurture. Democracy thrives only under certain conditions. These conditions include especially the moral commitments of a people to honor licit elections and to contain partisan means and ends within some bearable bounds.
Fortunately for the health of the body politic, William Jefferson Clinton was not ousted from office. Thanks partly to the constitutional mandate of consent from two-thirds of the Senate, and thus thanks indirectly to the founders` realistic understanding of what James Madison called the "mischief of faction" (Federalist, No. 10), we were spared the grave constitutional crisis and severe forms of civil discord resulting from the partisan displacement of a President against the public will.
Still, considerable damage occurred. The deep and pervasive distrust of and disillusionment with government received a big boost. The Republican legislative majority, spurred by the party righteous, went far beyond the bounds of ordinary and inevitable political rivalries. They thus escalated the hostilities and lowered the standards on permissible weapons in our nation`s political disputations.
At our most primal level, virtually all of us who are candid and who were offended by the impeachment and trial want, and many will seek, revenge. It`s "pay back time," a common means of maintaining political accountability. We can expect, despite pious denials from some politicians, that President Clinton and other Democrats will retaliate against their tormentors, so long as it doesn`t interfere unduly with their other political goals. Frankly, to some limited degree, this vindictive urge is politically valuable: It will serve as a counter-force and deterrent to a Right ironically reinvigorated by its fury over its failure to remove the President.
Yet, a history of reciprocal reprisals is part of what brought us to this painful point. We are in the midst of a degenerative spiraling of partisan enmity. We need to reverse the politics of mutual and total exclusion to avoid a free fall into a Machiavellian free-for-all.
The Clinton impeachment can be read ethically as a political challenge to the nation. A major issue for the future is not whether or how the nation can forgive President Clinton for his misdeeds, as some theologians suggested. That surely is a minor matter, given our rich religious resources. Instead, the issue is whether and how the parties and factions of this nation can forgive one another for our mutual trespasses, real and imagined, and learn to live together in tolerable fairness and peace.
What are the political vices that corrupt the common good? Thus, conversely, what are the political virtues that should be cultivated in our citizens and demanded of our politicians? How can we shift our political discourse from mutual vilification and demagogic manipulation to something that at least resembles rationality and honesty? How shall we as a people define and respect legitimate partisanship and its limits? These are among the critical questions we are forced to face by the impeachment and other events. To answer these questions, we may need to borrow from the South African experience and create some American-style truth and reconciliation commissions.
