Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [417]
The dubious impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, which had opened in the Senate in March 1868 and lasted two and a half months, provided the only precedent for structuring the Clinton proceedings. President Johnson, a Democrat, had been impeached by a House of Representatives dominated by radical Republicans who had floated dark theories that Johnson had played a role in President Lincoln’s assassination and was a traitor to Lincoln’s Reconstruction policies in the South. As a technical matter, Johnson had been impeached for refusing to follow the Tenure of Office Act when he fired Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton without Congress’s approval; Johnson had claimed the act was unconstitutional. As a practical matter, however, the Johnson impeachment trial was a showdown between political opponents fighting for control of the nation’s agenda after the Civil War.
Seven House impeachment managers, all of them Republicans, had served as prosecutors. The chief justice of the United States, Salmon P. Chase, presided over the trial pursuant to Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution. The president did not appear at trial; nor was he required to do so. The proceedings consisted of lengthy presentations by the managers who introduced evidence; testimony from scattered witnesses; long rebuttals by President Johnson’s defense team; impassioned closing arguments; and a prolonged roll call vote on three articles of impeachment (there had been eleven in total). In the end, the Senate acquitted Johnson by a razor-thin margin of one vote. The president survived the political assault—just barely—and the nation slowly put this bruising experience behind it.
Other than that long-ago history preserved in dusty boxes in the Senate’s archives, little precedent was available to construct a blueprint for the trial of William Jefferson Clinton in the winter of 1999. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist Paper No. 65, had suggested that impeachable offenses were limited to “offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men,” or from the abuse or violation of some public “trust.” The legal scholar Joseph Story, who later occupied a seat on the Supreme Court, had described impeachment as “a proceeding purely of a political nature. It is not so much designed to punish an offender as to secure the state against gross official misdemeanors. It touches neither [the accused’s] person or his property, but simply divests him of his political capacity.” Yet not everyone shared such a narrow view. Then House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, in leading an unsuccessful impeachment effort against ultraliberal Justice William O. Douglas in 1970, had proclaimed that an impeachable offense was “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
Two centuries after the founding of the nation, there was scant precedent as to how—or why—William Jefferson Clinton could be convicted and removed from office.
THE duty fell upon Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, seventy-four years old and a pillar of conservatism on the Court, to occupy the presiding chair in the Clinton impeachment trial. Senators Lott and Daschle now faced a hundred logistical nightmares: How would the Senate leaders, who usually ran that body’s proceedings, interface with the chief justice? (They immediately dispatched their staffs to the Supreme Court, to meet with the chief.) What about space? Every member of Congress, including all 435 House members, technically had a right to a seat in the Senate chamber for the entire trial. Where in heaven’s name would they fit? What about the thirteen House managers (who would serve as prosecutors) and the half-dozen lawyers for the president who needed space on the Senate floor? If witnesses were going to be called, would the Senate carpenters need to construct a witness box? The most recent impeachment proceedings—involving federal judges Henry Claiborne, Alcee Hastings, and Walter Nixon—had all been handled under Senate rules by a “Committee of Twelve,