The Clinton Presidency and the Constitutional System

Assessing the Impeachment of President Clinton from a Post-9/11 Perspective

Assessing the Impeachment of President Clinton from a Post-9/11 Perspective susan low bloch Introduction The atmosphere surrounding the impeachment of President Clinton was more a circus than a serious effort to remove the president from office. The reason for that is simple: very few people—either in the Congress or in the country—really wanted to remove him or thought the impeachment effort would actually result in his removal. Instead, it was a political effort to embarrass Clinton and “send a message” of disapproval; in short, to attach a scarlet letter “I.” But few seemed to assess the potential costs and dangers inherent in such an approach. This article will address whether it is appropriate to use the impeachment process simply to send a message, whether we can afford such frivolous treatment of the commander in chief, and, if not, what reforms are possible. The article begins by examining the two prior serious attempts to impeach and remove a president of the United States—that of Andrew Johnson in the 1860s andofRichardNixoninthe1970s.Itwillshowthattheapproachtoimpeachment during those efforts was notably different from that exhibited during the Clinton impeachment. Those impeachments were serious efforts to remove the president from office; impeachment was not being used simply to send a message. The first presidential impeachment occurred with Andrew Johnson in the 1860s. The times were notably different from the “exuberance” of the 1990s.1 The country had just experienced the trauma of the Civil War and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Thus, members of Congress as well as the public presumably understood both the need for a full-time, undistracted commander in chief and the perils inherent in blithely impeaching and removing him. But because the public had little love for Johnson and his apparent willingness to tolerate the South’s newly enacted “Black Codes,” they really wanted to remove him, notwithstanding the attendant disruption. Ironically, President Lincoln, a Republican, had asked Johnson, a Democrat, to join his presidential ticket in the 1864 election to unite the country. Suddenly, after Lincoln’s assassination, Vice President Johnson, a member of the minority assessing the impeachment of president clinton • 191 party, had, under the most unfortunate circumstance, become president and seemed to be undermining the opportunities the Civil War had been fought to achieve.2 Whether it was appropriate for Congress to impeach Andrew Johnson for what could be described as essentially policy differences is debatable.3 But there is no question that Congress was engaged in a serious effort to remove him from office—this was not a frivolous gesture to slap him on the wrist. It was a bipartisan effort that almost succeeded; the Senate’s vote to convict and remove President Johnson from office failed by only one vote. The second effort to impeach and remove a president involved the challenge to Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. Here, too, the times were distinctly different from the 1990s. The country was in the final throes of the Vietnam War. Memories of political assassinations were fresh and vivid—President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King had all been brutally murdered.4 The public understood the need for a strong, focused president, but they no longer wanted Richard Nixon as their president. They believed Nixon had committed serious abuses of power and earnestly wanted him out of office. Impeachment was the appropriate tool and would probably have succeeded had Nixon not short-circuited the process by resigning. Indeed, it was the likelihood of a successful impeachment, conviction, and removal that led Nixon to resign. Like the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, this effort was a serious, popularly supported endeavor to remove the president. No one was simply using impeachment to teach Nixon a lesson. After examining these precedents in more detail, the article will explore the Clinton impeachment and the motivations of those who undertook it. The article will ultimately conclude that the effort to impeach Clinton was a highly partisan undertaking on the part of the House of Representatives that was not truly reflective of public sentiment.5 It will also note that few members of the House either expected the Senate to convict and remove him or considered the impact impeachment would have on the country. Virtually no one asked whether, or to what extent, the ordeal would affect the president’s ability to govern and to be commander in chief. This silence is not surprising. President Clinton’s impeachment occurred during a period of considerable prosperity and...