The Clinton Presidency and the Constitutional System

The View from the White House

The View from the White House lanny j. davis I would like to reaffirm and state three words key to understanding why President Clinton was right to fight impeachment. One, the word is illegitimacy —versus legitimacy. The act of impeaching Bill Clinton was an illegitimate constitutional act, period. It was illegitimate how he got into the room with Paula Jones and was in the position to testify falsely or misleadingly about a relationship that most Americans understood is the one misleading or false statement they all get. In a civil deposition in a case that was thrown out on summary judgment, President Clinton’s answers to some of the personal questions may have been misleading or incomplete, but even if they were, they were immaterial since the Jones case was so baseless that it was ultimately in large part dismissed on summary judgment. What then got him into the impeachment was not that misleading or false statement under oath—which was not perjury. Perjury is defined as lying under oath on a material issue in the case. There was no perjury in the Paula Jones deposition because the affair with Monica Lewinsky, according to Judge Wright, was irrelevant to the issue of sexual harassment and would never have been admitted at trial. In my opinion, no perjury ever occurred by any legal standard of the definition of perjury in that deposition. In the grand jury, President Clinton told the truth and admitted the relationship, something that most married men and women would never do under oath, much less publicly. He admitted to a grand jury and told the truth. End of story. There was no legitimate basis to impeach President Clinton on perjury. In my opinion, that’s a fact. What is not a fact is the subjective view that alleged lying in the deposition of Paula Jones is an impeachable offense, and trying to cover it up. That is a subjective argument. I say no, that is not a high crime and misdemeanor, and I agree with the previous speakers that the framers of the Constitution did not mean to remove a president over testifying misleadingly or falsely in a civil deposition in a case that was thrown out because it was frivolous. Two, proportionality. After the word illegitimacy, let’s talk proportionality. President Clinton behaved terribly, as he himself has stated many times. A lot of us behave terribly when it comes to private relationships, private conver- the view from the white house • 237 sations, and a lot of things we wouldn’t want people to hear publicly. What was the proportional response to that behavior? [Senator] Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has told me that, at least at one point, he would have considered a vote of censure for the terrible behavior. That should have been the outcome. Right after the November elections, where the American people repudiated this illegitimate impeachment process, we should have called Lindsey Graham and Representative Jim Rogan (R-Calif.)—one of the GOP House managers who was most reasonable—and some of the other good-faith, good-thinking House managers—I won’t put them all in that category—and required that President Clinton offer an apology and accept a resolution of censure. That would have been the end of that. Clinton supporters didn’t press for this result, then, because we had won in November and we had hubris. That was unfortunately for me the biggest misjudgment: when we won [additional seats in the House in 1998], we did not reach out and try to get this thing over with before an impeachment vote. We did not seek a censure resolution at that moment. The third word is legacy. The historic legacy of the Clinton presidency is that it was a great presidency. This incident regarding Ms. Lewinsky isn’t even going to be an asterisk if you judge presidential performance. The experts on the subject of legacy are not we, not talking-head pundits, and certainly not the hate mongers like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter or any of the others that you hear throwing dirt on television. The experts are the American people. They made the judgment on performance. That judgment is that this man was a great president. When he left office on January 20, 2001, President Clinton had a 65 percent approval rating—one of the highest in the history of modern polling at the end of a president’s term. That’s proof—final proof—of...