22 Monday Feb 1999
Posted in Weekly Standard
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In light of the conclusion of the Senate trial of the president, the editors of THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked 22 writers, thinkers, and political actors the following questions: “President William Jefferson Clinton has been impeached and acquitted. What have we learned? What should we do now?”
04 Monday Jan 1999
Posted in Weekly Standard
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Presiding
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It will begin like this: The presiding officer of the U.S. Senate will ask the man before him in the Senate chamber, William H. Rehnquist, the chief justice of the United States, to raise his right hand and take this oath: “I solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton, president of the United States, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the laws: so help me God.” Rehnquist, in turn, will administer the same oath to all the members of the Senate, sitting as a jury. This will likely occur on or about January 7. And the trial to determine whether Bill Clinton will be removed from office will get underway.
If such a trial comes to pass, inevitably, it’s going to have a certain majesty — in fact, a majesty out of all proportion to the tawdry conduct about which Clinton lied and obstructed justice, according to the articles of impeachment passed by the House. The Senate is well-practiced in trying to fake solemnity, albeit with mixed success. With the chief justice presiding over the Senate trial of an impeached president for only the second time in history, however, the solemnity is going to be genuine.
23 Monday Nov 1998
Posted in National Review
The National Review
NOTWITHSTANDING that the House voted to authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Clinton’s lies and obstruction only this October, the fact is that an impeachment inquiry has been underway since January. That’s when independent counsel Kenneth Starr sought and received the blessing of the Justice Department and the court overseeing his investigation to look into the President’s possible perjury and obstruction in the Paula Jones sexual-misconduct case. In essence, Starr began conducting a sort of preliminary inquiry on behalf of (but not under the supervision of) the House Judiciary Committee, where articles of impeachment will in theory originate.
01 Sunday Nov 1998
Posted in Weekly Standard
The Weekly Standard
NO ACCOUNT OF A RULING by a federal judge these days is complete without a note on whether the judge was a Democratic or Republican appointee. Why is that? In theory, we should have judicial decisions that apply the law, not rulings based on the personal political preferences of judges. In practice, however, no one is terribly surprised when a ruling favorable to the GOP cause comes from a Republican-appointed judge or when a Democratic appointee comes up with a conclusion favorable to Democrats.
How cynical a view is this? Are the black robes really just camouflage for the indelible stamp of party affiliation guiding each judge’s decisions? That seems overwrought. From time to time you do run across a left-leaning outcome from a Republican appointee or a right-leaning outcome from a Democratic appointee. And even in cases where results conform to cynical expectations, one must not lose sight of the fact that Republican appointees tend to differ from Democratic appointees in their theories of jurisprudence.
05 Monday Oct 1998
Posted in Weekly Standard
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WHAT A MAGICAL SHAPE-CHANGING BEAST this independent-counsel law is! In its marauding two-decade-long journey through the American political landscape, it has revealed aspects of itself we poor peasants could never have imagined. Republicans and now Democrats have felt the fury of the creature, its quasi-immortality, its voraciousness, its single-mindedness in pursuit of its prey. But now, for the first time, it has given birth — to impeachment proceedings against the president in the House of Representatives. And only now are we learning of the peculiar sway it has on the minds of men. Republicans, perhaps mesmerized, came to believe that they could tame it, or at least let it do their work for them. But whether it serves them or they are its captives is an open question.
07 Monday Sep 1998
Posted in Weekly Standard
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As WASHINGTON GEARS UP for the arrival in the House of Representatives of Kenneth Starr’s report on President Clinton’s impeachable offenses, a particularly virulent strain of wannabe conventional wisdom has been making the rounds. It is that Republicans would prefer (if they put party ahead of country) to keep a weakened Clinton in office for two more years — because an incumbent President Gore running in the 2000 presidential race gives them the heebie-jeebies.
31 Monday Aug 1998
Posted in Weekly Standard
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NO GOOD MORALITY TALE is complete these days without a wallow in the slough of victimhood, and the Monica Lewinsky affair is no exception. Those laying claim to the mantle of victim are many, ranging from President Clinton (in his blast against independent counsel Kenneth Starr when he was supposed to be apologizing) to Monica herself (who at last report was miffed that the Big He didn’t have so much as a kind word for her). As the week of The Speech unfolded, though, the emerging consensus of official Washington was that the true victims were the poor souls whom Bill Clinton had callously and calculatingly sent out for seven months to do his lying for him: the loyal aides and allies who had taken him at his word.
29 Monday Jun 1998
Posted in Weekly Standard
From Yugoslavia to Dayton, Ohio.
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The turning point for Bosnia came in August 1995 with a NATO bombing campaign. The air strikes succeeded in doing what no diplomatic effort had: persuading Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to join in ending the four-year-old war over the pieces of the former Yugoslavia. Before the bombing, the aggressors in Bosnia treated international efforts with contempt, even taking hostages from the ineffectual U.N. peacekeeping force. But barely three months after the strikes began, a comprehensive peace agreement was reached at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
The decision to bomb for peace was controversial, to put it mildly. Most European governments found it unattractive and risky, as did NATO, the American military, and the major international organizations. Yet they were all equally mindful of the failure of diplomacy in Bosnia — and its horrible consequences in lost lives, ethnic cleansing and refugees. What to do?
01 Monday Jun 1998
Posted in American Spectator
The American Spectator
Conservatives Inside Out: Lessons Learned the Hard Way, A Personal Report by Newt Gingrich, HarperCollins / 229 pages / $25
The Freshmen: What Happened to the Republican Revolution? by Linda Killian, Westview / 463 pages / $28
The great national political story of the century’s closing decades is the collision of conservative ideology and political reality–that is, what happens when conservatism tries to govern. The answer has been unfolding since the election in November 1994 of a Republican Congress that, notwithstanding a Democrat in the White House, promised a “Revolution” in Washington. Almost four years later, with the GOP still in power on Capitol Hill and that same president coasting at his highest approval ratings ever, many ideological conservatives deem the result a disaster–and blame it on the failure of elected officials to fight for their principles. Most Republican officeholders, on the other hand, don’t consider themselves any less conservative now than in the exuberance of 1995; they claim incremental success in the face of extraordinary opposition and ask for patience.
02 Monday Mar 1998
Posted in Weekly Standard
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INDEPENDENT COUNSEL KENNETH STARR believes that, constitutionally, his office cannot indict the president of the United States. What, then, of the evidence the prosecutor is assembling suggesting that Bill Clinton may have lied under oath, urged others to do the same, rewarded them for doing so, and generally obstructed justice in an effort to limit the collateral damage from Paula Jones’s charges of sexual misconduct? The short answer is that Starr will refer any such evidence to the House Judiciary Committee, which would decide whether the information warranted impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” If the House votes to impeach, the Senate then tries the case.
Tod Lindberg 