Seeing impeachment through a party lens

Democrats put us on this path with Clinton

It seems almost inevitable that the Senate will vote against convicting former President Donald Trump on the insurrection impeachment charge filed by the House. Given the evidence, this would be a grievous injury to our democracy.

And while the Republicans who choose to ignore Trump’s attempt to subvert an election will bear most of the blame, spare a thought for the Democrats and the role they played in bringing us to this place in history. For they sowed the seeds for this error more than two decades ago during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

To be clear, the two cases are not in any way substantively comparable. Clinton’s impeachable acts were tawdry and violated criminal law, but they pale next to the egregious anti- democratic insurrection that Trump incited. Nonetheless, in rejecting Clinton’s impeachment, the Democratic Party set an important precedent of partisan disregard for presidential misconduct.

Clinton’s wrongdoing, it was said, was “lying about sex,” a family matter of no real concern to the general public. And there is a degree of truth to this. Clinton’s acts involved personal wrongdoing that, as far as the public record reflects, had little or no impact on his exercise of presidential authority.

Trump, by contrast, misused presidential authority to pressure a foreign nation to support him in his reelection campaign, retaliated against those who exposed his misconduct and then again abused presidential power by inciting a riot in an effort to overturn an election. But to say Clinton simply lied about a private affair is both false to fact and has echoed down the corridors of American history to today’s events.

I was part of independent counsel Ken Starr’s team that investigated Clinton. We found that Clinton did not merely lie about an affair — he did so under oath during court proceedings on at least two occasions. He did not merely seek to hide the fact that he was cheating on his wife — he attempted to obstruct justice and tampered with witnesses to do so. This is not just personal misconduct; he violated legal norms that bind all Americans.

Partisan relativism

Far from being dismissed as private errors, these are crimes. And when committed by the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, they are crimes of national significance, even when the background lies in personal peccadillo. If the Clinton impeachment was about anything, it was about holding a president to the same standard as an average citizen.

And yet the Senate, in 1999, chose to see the impeachment charges as partisan animus and rejected them as an assault on Clinton’s election and policies.

Perhaps they were right, in a relative sense. I have little doubt that some Republicans advocated Clinton’s impeachment for political reasons rather than on principle. One need only look at the Clinton- to- Trump impeachment flip- flops from senators like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell to realize both parties politicize impeachment.

But someone has to stand up for principle. Or at least someone should have. By excusing Clinton’s conduct, the Senate took an irrevocable step on the slippery path to partisan relativism. I understand ( having lived through the moment) why Democrats felt justified. And had that impeachment been the end of it, their choice might not have been so damaging.

A grave assault

But it wasn’t the end. Today, Trump’s supporters argue against the weight of history that post- term impeachment trials are impermissible, and that Trump’s incitement of violence was just the exercise of free speech. These are transparent makeweights for what is really happening: Republicans are treating Trump’s impeachment as a partisan fight rather than an opportunity to reflect on and redress the gravest assault ( both figuratively and literally) on American democracy since the Civil War.

In making this choice, the Republicans follow the path that was broken in the Clinton impeachment. Cloaking the decision in the veil of partisan interest, Democrats established a norm — that senators may view impeachment through the lens of party advantage.

Any reasonable assessment of the facts would see Trump’s assault on the result of a democratic election as a far graver threat than Clinton’s perjury. Perhaps the Republican Party will see its way clear to rising above partisan considerations. One can only hope, against hope, that will be the case.

Paul Rosenzweig, a senior fellow in the National Security and Cyber Security Program at the R Street Institute, was senior counsel to Ken Starr in the Whitewater investigation of Bill Clinton and a Homeland Security official in the George W. Bush administration.

SUSAN WALSH/ AP Then- President Bill Clinton, with first lady Hillary Clinton.