Clinton Impeachment Trial(英)

ugust 1998, the survival of the Clinton presidency seemed in real doubt.

　　Kenneth Starr was required by law to present the House with "any substantial and credible information" that might provide a gro

und for impeachment. On September 9, Starr piled thirty-six boxes of evidence on the Lewinsky scandal into two vans and ordered them driven to Capitol Hill for deposit. Two days later, the Starr Report, a 453-page summary of the evidence against the President, was released to the public over the Internet. The report outlined the case for eleven counts against Clinton, including perjury in his Jones and grand jury depositions, obstruction of justice, and one count asserting abuse of office. Late night comics and critics of the President relished the incredibly explicit details of the report, ranging from the fact that the President took calls from Congressman while receiving oral sex to an account of his inserting his cigar in Lewinsky's vagina. The embarrassing details, which were unnecessary to the prosecution case, were seen by some commentators as a spiteful effort by the OIC to debilitate the Clinton presidency.

　　Responsibility for recommending action on impeachment fell to the House Judiciary Committee and its Chairman, Henry Hyde. (Hyde, meanwhile, had his own problem to manage: reports surfaced that the widely respected septuagenarian congressman had had an affair some thirty years earlier.) The committee voted to release a videotape of Clinton's four hours of testimony before the grand jury, as well as over 7,000 other pages of evidence, including DNA test results, love notes from Lewinsky to the President, transcripts of Lewinsky's conversations with Linda Tripp, and White House phone logs. After pouring over the evidence and listening to its appointed counsel, the Committee, voting 21 to 16 along party lines on October 5, authorized a full impeachment inquiry. Democrats on the committee, arguing that the case came down to "lying about sex," generally favored censure as an alternative. The Committee's decision was ratified by the full House three days later, with thirty-one Democrats joining the majority.

　　Mid-term elections on November 3 brought good news for the President. Before the election, Gingrich predicted that Republicans would gain twenty House seats. In fact, they lost five. Despite the losses, widely interpreted as a public vote against impeachment, Hyde determined to press forward with the inquiry, although on a faster timetable. Privately, Hyde thought impeachment was dead, telling Democratic congressman Charles Schumer, "Charlie, don't worry about it: the committee will report out the articles, but they'll die on the House floor." The disappointing election results convinced Bob Livingston to challenge Gingrich for the position of House Speaker. Within hours of Livingston's decision, Gingrich announced his resignation. One week after Gingrich's surprise announcement, there was another big development: Clinton and Paula Jones finally agreed to settle the sexual harassment lawsuit that had caused all the President's miseries.

　　Over the course of the next month, the Judiciary Committee considered the evidence and sought to separate Clinton's minor transgressions from those that might form the basis for articles of impeachment. The highlight of the committee's hearings came with the testimony of Kenneth Starr. While Republican members asked questions designed to help Starr lay out his case against the President, Democratic members——preferring to put Starr himself on trial—— asked questions that supported their goal of portraying Starr as a zealot. Democratic member John Conyers characterized Starr as "a federally paid sex policeman." As another part of the process, the Committee drafted a set of 81 questions for the President to answer concerning a series of events relating to the Lewinsky scandal and his prior testimony. The President answered, but——in the opinion of Committee Republicans——in a quarrelsome, unresponsive way. Frequently, he responded to questions by saying he did not recall something. Irritated by his answers, some undecided House Republicans moved toward favoring

impeachment.

　　After listening to a panel of experts on impeachment and lawyers for the President earlier in the week, the Judiciary Committee voted on December 11 and 12 to approve four articles of impeachment. The next day, Hyde joined Tom De Lay and Majority Leader Richard Armey in calling for the President to resign. Clinton, the same day, tells reporters that the thought "never crossed my mind."

　　The next week, as the President juggled ordering U. S. planes to launch missile strikes on Iraq with phone calls to undecided Republican House members, impeachment moved to a final vote in the House. Adding to the drama was the resignation the same day of Bob Livingston on the floor of the House following disclosure of an affair of his own (stemming from an offer by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt to pay $1 million for "documentary evidence of illicit sexual relations" involving high-ranking members of Congress). Minority Leader Richard Gephardt rose to ask Livingston to reconsider his decision to step down, telling his colleagues, "We need to stop destroying imperfect people at the alter of an unobtainable morality." When the final vote came, the House approved two of the four impeachment articles sent up by the Judiciary Committee, rejecting Article II, based on perjury in the Jones deposition, and Article IV containing general charges relating to his unresponsive answers to Judiciary Committee questions and abuse of his office.

　　That evening, December 19, 1998, on the South Lawn of the White House surrounded by Democratic supporters, the President thanked those who voted against the impeachment articles and urged that we "stop the politics of personal destruction. We must," he said, "get rid of the poisonous venom of excessive partisanship, obsessive animosity, and uncontrolled anger." Polls taken that week suggested that the American public sided with Clinton, with 60% opposing impeachment.

　　Trial in the Senate

　　"Hear, ye! Hear, ye! Hear, ye!" the Senate's sergeant at arms called out on January 7, 1999. "All persons are commanded to keep silent, on pain of imprisonment, while the House of Representatives is exhibiting to the Senate the articles of impeachment against William Jefferson Clinton, president of the United States."

　　The impeachment trial of the President formally opened before all 100 senators with the reading of the charges against the President and the swearing in of the presiding officer, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, dressed in a black robe with four bright yellow braids on each sleeve, a fashion idea that Rehnquist had taken from a judge in Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe.

　　The next day, the Senate met in a closed session to hammer out a bipartisan plan (passed on a vote of 100 to 0) for procedural rules to govern the trial. Each side would get twenty-four hours to present its case without witnesses. The Senators would then have two days for a question-and-answer session, Only after that would the Senate vote on motions to dismiss or requests for witnesses.

　　The House managers, who would prosecute Clinton in the Senate, plotted strategy. A key question they faced was whether to call live witnesses and, if so, how many and which ones. A preliminary list drawn up included many names: the judge in Jones case, Susan Weber Wright, Monica Lewinsky, Secret Service agents, Kathleen Willey (a White House volunteer who claimed to have been groped by Clinton), Vernon Jordan, various Clinton aides, and even New York mayor Rudy Giuliani (who, as a former U. S. attorney, could address the subject of prosecutions of public officials). Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, and Minority Leader Tom Daschle, were not, however, thrilled at the prospect of live witnesses. They saw live witnesses as a threat to their desire to stage a speedy and dignified trial that would not become an embarrassing national spectacle. Both leaders understood that the prospects of

at least a dozen Democratic Senators voting to convict, the minimum necessary for the required two-thirds vote, were exceedingly slim——barring some new shocking revelation about the President's conduct.

　　The trial got underway in earnest on January 14. "Well, let's begin," the Chief Justice announced, adding, "Fight fair." House Manager James Sensenbrenner opened the prosecution case with a monotonous summary of the case that left some Senators, such as Alaska's Ted Stevens, asleep. Other senators, including Joseph Biden, Arlen Specter, an Bob Kerry, took extensive notes. Following Sensenbrenner, three other managers had somewhat better luck keeping senators alert with a parade of charts, timelines, and video clips aimed at demonstrating a pattern of illegal obstruction of justice. Even Democratic senators conceded that Manager Asa Hutchinson's outlining of the sequence of events in the Lewinsky affair was especially effective. Some appeared to be having second thoughts about their intended votes.

　　As opening arguments continued for another four hours the next day, senators struggled to remain engaged during what became, in Peter Baker's description in The Breach, "a law school seminar on perjury and obstruction of justice." The only break in the tedium came when Iowa's Democratic Senator Tom Harkin stood and shouted, "Mr. Chief Justice, I object." Harkin's objection turned out to be to the managers' practice of referring to the senators as "jurors" when in fact their role required them to take account not only the evidence, but the effect impeachment might have on the nation. Chief Justice Rehnquist generally agreed and told

┨网页设计特效库┠ http://www。z┗co⊙l。com/网页特效/