‘Nakedly partisan ... disrespectful’
Impeachment of Trump echoes that of Clinton
– “The impeachment debate has been nakedly partisan, rhetorically vicious, procedurally addled and disrespectful of honest differences. It has produced little majesty and much cant … So many House districts are now so politically one-sided that it appeared during impeachment proceedings as if Republican and Democratic lawmakers were representing two different countries.”
Those are words this reporter used to describe the House debate over impeachment 21 years ago, when DemoWASHINGTON crat Bill Clinton was president.
But they could also apply to the House debate that just concluded over the impeachment of Republican Donald Trump.
The Trump impeachment carries broad rhetorical echoes of the Clinton impeachment. It features similar arguments about the virtues and perils of impeaching a president, but with the parties reversing roles, each side adopting the same words, logic, even metaphors used by the other side two decades ago.
The Trump impeachment encapsulates the partisan chasm in Congress and the country today, just as the Clinton impeachment did in the late 1990s.
It has inspired the same concerns about a coarsening of our politics, a
crippled presidency, institutional decline and a vicious cycle of partisan warfare.
Like the Trump impeachment, the Clinton impeachment was seen at the time as representing a new low in the nation’s partisan divide.
Illinois Republican Henry Hyde, the leader of the House impeachment effort two decades ago, was so distressed that Clinton would remain in office that he invoked the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and wondered, once the dust settled, “if an America will survive that is worth fighting for.”
The acrid, apocalyptic rhetoric of the Clinton impeachment is a reminder that Washington and the nation have been here before.
But the Clinton impeachment also reflects some key political differences between then and now. It suggests that despite all the parallels, the partisan and political lines are in fact even more stark today than they were back then.
This is not a comparison of the merits of the two impeachment cases, or the conduct of the two impeached presidents, but of the political debates they sparked in Congress.
First, a look at some of the common threads:
The dangers of impeachment
Back then, Democrats argued that ousting Clinton would lower the bar for removing a president and spawn an era of endless impeachments. New York Congressman Charles Schumer, now the Senate Democratic leader, warned of “an escalating chain of revenge.”
Democrats called it a “coup d’etat,” a “national horror” and a “constitutional assassination.” They said it would decapitate the presidency. White House lawyers argued that “no president of the United States will ever be safe from impeachment again.”
Republicans are ringing the same alarm bells today.
“By lowering the bar of what is an impeachable offense … we will all but ensure that all future divided governments will lead to impeachments,” Wisconsin Republican Jim Sensenbrenner wrote in a New York Times op-ed Friday attacking the impeachment effort against
Trump.
House Republican Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin said it would open a “Pandora’s box where we’re mired in a state of perpetual impeachment.” Trump and his backers have called it a coup.
Two decades ago, House Democrat Major Owens of New York called the impeachment of Clinton a “political crucifixion.” Last week on the House floor, Georgia Republican Barry Lowdermilk said, “Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus than the Democrats have afforded this president in this process.”
An imperial presidency
Back then, Republicans argued that failing to impeach and remove Clinton would lower the standard of presidential behavior and make the chief executive “a sovereign.”
“The consequence of allowing this to go unpunished is a return to the imperial presidency before Watergate where a president can run roughshod over the law,” Sensenbrenner told the Journal Sentinel before Clinton’s 1999 Senate trial, in which he served as one of the House impeachment managers.
It’s the same fear that Democrats raise today.
“This impeachment asks whether we are still a republic of laws, as our Founders intended — or whether we will accept that one person can be above the law,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said in his speech at the end of the floor debate last week.
Party divide
The Clinton impeachment fight was viewed by many as a new extreme in partisanship, just as the Trump impeachment fight is seen today. The House Judiciary Committee voted for impeachment in 1998 almost entirely along party lines, similar to the partyline votes in the same committee on Trump’s impeachment earlier this month.
In 1998, judiciary chairman Hyde lamented that because Democrats could not be persuaded to support impeaching Clinton, “tragically there is no bipartisanship here.” Democrats raged over what they perceived as an unfair process controlled by Republicans. A “farce,” they called it, and staged a walkout at one point when they were denied the option of voting on Clinton’s censure as an alternative.
This time around, Republicans have complained that Democrats in the House conducted a “railroad” impeachment that denied the minority its proper role and voice, including a minority day of hearings that Sensenbrenner sought. Democrats, meanwhile, have blamed the highly partisan nature of the debate on the blanket refusal of Republicans to stand up to Trump.
Politics vs. principle
Back then, Republicans declared that they approached the task of impeachment solemnly and reluctantly, with the unswerving goal of upholding the rule of law. Sensenbrenner told the House Judiciary Committee in 1998 that he pursued impeachment “without joy but with no apologies.”
Democrats accused them of pursuing a blind vendetta.
Today, Democrats from Speaker Nancy Pelosi on down have portrayed their push for impeachment effort as a sad, solemn and joyless duty, while Republicans accuse them of pursing a fanatical mission to destroy the Trump presidency.
These are some of many political and rhetorical parallels between two impeachment debates fought along very stark party lines.
But as partisan as the Clinton impeachment debate was, the Trump impeachment debate has been even more so, reflecting new extremes of partisan division in Congress and the nation, as well as the lightning rod nature of the Trump presidency.
For example, 31 House Democrats broke with their party to approve the Clinton impeachment inquiry. No Republicans crossed over to endorse the Trump impeachment inquiry.
On the two articles of impeachment that passed the full House in 1998, only 10 and 17 members, respectively, out of 435 broke with their parties on the issue. On two others that didn’t pass, 33 and 82 lawmakers broke ranks with their parties.
This time, two and three lawmakers, respectively, broke with their parties on the two articles of impeachment adopted against Trump. On top of that, two House members have left their parties over impeachment, one on each side.
That heightened partisanship has surfaced in other ways, too.
In the Trump impeachment, Republicans have been loath to say anything critical about Trump’s conduct with respect to Ukraine. That wasn’t true of Democrats during the Clinton impeachment fight, who decried Clinton’s conduct in engaging in a relationship with a White House intern and then lying about it.
Numerous House Democrats (including Milwaukee’s Tom Barrett) promoted a censure resolution against Clinton.
Senate Democrat Herb Kohl of Wisconsin called Clinton’s conduct “deplorable” and spoke of “the deep disquiet I feel about the failings, lies and weakness displayed by the president. Under the cold body of evidence before us runs the bad blood of bad character and that deeply disturbs me.”
Senate Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin said afterward, “I’m ready to serve under another president.”
Signs also point to a much more openly partisan Senate trial in the Trump impeachment than occurred two decades ago. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last week dismissed the idea that senators should approach impeachment like jurors with open minds and no predetermined judgments.
“I’m not an impartial juror,” McConnell said last week. “This is a political process. There is not anything judicial about it.”
Said McConnell: “Impeachment is a political decision. The House made a partisan political decision to impeach … I would anticipate we will have a largely partisan outcome in the Senate. I’m not impartial about this at all.”
The Senate’s GOP leadership took a much different tack two decades ago. Republicans likened senators to jurors when they favored holding final deliberations behind closed doors. “This as close to a jury as it gets,” said the spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.
Many, if not most, senators in the Clinton impeachment felt obligated to keep an open mind, or at least reserve judgment publicly about that case.
“When we’re sworn in as jurors ... we say that we will approach it independently and without our minds made up. We have to work at that,” Kohl said.
Feingold, who was facing re-election in 1998, accused his opponent (GOP congressman Mark Neumann) of prejudging the impeachment, and con
tended that he himself had no idea how he would vote. Feingold, in fact, called it “a close case.” Republican Paul Ryan, who was making his first bid for Congress in 1998, said he “had no idea” whether Clinton’s conduct was impeachable.
As bitter as that battle was, the lines of debate between the parties weren’t as absolute as they seem to be today.
At one point in the 1999 Clinton impeachment trial, Kohl asked then GOP House member (and now senator) Lindsey Graham, one of the impeachment managers, if reasonable people could disagree about whether a president should be removed for this particular conduct.
“Absolutely,” said Graham, to the dismay of his fellow Republican impeachment managers. “When you take the good of this nation, the up side and down side, reasonable people can disagree about what’s the best thing to do.”
That is the kind of exchange you may not hear during the Trump impeachment trial.