Aftermath: The Clinton Impeachment and the Presidency in the Age of Political Spectacle

Chapter 8:The Gold Standard and Guilt-Edged Insecurities: The Impeachment Crucible as Tragic Farce

Chapter 8 The Gold Standard and Guilt-Edged Insecurities The Impeachment Crucible as Tragic Farce Aviam Soifer There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. —Hamlet Prelude: Shining Moments? At least one prize glittered. Moments after the formal acquittal of William Jefferson Clinton ended his impeachment trial, the Senate leaders of both parties presented Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist with a plaque featuring a golden gavel. Usually, majority leader Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi explained, with minority leader Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota smiling at his side, one must preside over the Senate for a hundred hours to be awarded the golden gavel. But the Chief Justice’s duty in presiding over the impeachment trial apparently was close enough for government work. Rehnquist, wearing his now-famous gold-striped robe, took the plaque and then quickly left the Senate chamber to a standing ovation from all the Senators and many of those in the public galleries.1 We are left wondering many things about that moment and about the meaning of the Chief Justice’s role in presiding, particularly during the Senate’s closed sessions. The Chief Justice’s very presence suggested that the Senate’s secret proceedings might constitute a familiar kind of trial. But we are also left in the dark about how much gold covers that plaque, for example, and who paid for it. And now we might want to know if the 113 Chief Justice declared the gift on his annual income reporting forms. Certainly he has since failed to recuse himself even in cases in which the Senate has been directly involved. Yet one does not need the Antiques Roadshow to grasp that the plaque the Chief Justice received is surely worth much more than its weight in gold as a collector’s item. Are we soon therefore to face another impeachment for possible judicial “high crimes and misdemeanors”? Probably not. After all, how could the Vice President preside, as the Constitution provides, and how many stripes is Al Gore likely to demand? Notwithstanding the (almost) priceless gold gavel the Chief Justice recently received , we can be sure that he will avoid legal difficulties entirely. We can count on prosecutorial discretion—and the commonsense wishes of the American people—can’t we? And if the Chief Justice were to be impeached and tried, could anyone else fill Rehnquist’s shoes in reprising the role of the Lord Chancellor in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, the selfproclaimed inspiration for the Chief Justice’s unprecedented decision to appear gold-striped a few years ago? After all, it is the Chancellor who sings, “The law is the true embodiment / Of everything that’s excellent, / It has no kind of fault or flaw, / And I, my Lords, embody the law.”2 The Clinton impeachment imbroglio helped to underscore how deeply, publicly problematic it has become to determine who or what embodies the Rule of Law today. Notwithstanding all the experts gleefully exploiting the leisure of the theory class, the impeachment debacle demonstrated how controversial the reification of the law has become. The Rule of Law begins to seem like an indefinable shibboleth, an incantation that allows everything and anyone who can afford it to pass. The abstract Law seems to have no true embodiment, no clear benchmark, no place where anyone can go look it up definitively. This is a sad truth. So many people—including Supreme Court justices who should and probably do know better—seek someone, anyone authoritative, to say it ain’t so. But did anyone who really thought about it ever think that the law is now, or ever was, as good as gold? The Gold Standard It turns out that even if the Chief Justice’s souvenir for presiding over the impeachment were worth only its weight in gold, we still could not be sure what even that cliché means. On the one hand, no less weighty an expert 114 av i a m s o i f e r than Alan Greenspan recently proclaimed that gold remains the “ultimate form of payment.”3 On the other hand, the price of gold has been plummeting for years. And today there actually is no legal gold standard. Yet as with many other matters for which standards now seem elusive—thereby causing people to yearn for a Golden Age that never was—upon closer examination there...