The Clinton Impeachment
An impeachment pursued by a new, combative brand of Republican politicians set new norms for the impeachment process, demonstrated how popularity can shield presidents from oversight, and displayed how partisanship influences the interactions between the branches of government.
Issue
By early 1998, Kenneth Starr’s years-long independent counsel investigation into alleged financial impropriety by President Clinton during his tenure as governor of Arkansas (the Whitewater “scandal”) had failed to uncover any evidence of wrongdoing. Starr’s efforts, which began following his appointment in 1994, were encouraged by House Speaker Newt Gingrich and aided by concurrent House and Senate investigations into the matter. Through their continued efforts, investigators uncovered a recording of White House intern Monica Lewinsky offering explicit details of her affair with Clinton. Starr then decided to steer the investigation off its intended course and further pursue these allegations.
Testifying under oath, the president initially denied having a sexual relationship with Lewinsky. When later confronted with Lewinsky’s own detailed deposition, Clinton admitted to having an “improper” relationship with her, but vehemently objected to separate allegations of pressuring staffers to conceal the affair. Armed with this testimony, Starr presented his report to Republican leaders in the House who immediately prepared articles of impeachment.
Following partisan and acrimonious debate, in December 1998 the House impeached Clinton. The vote counts reflected the tone of the proceedings; only a handful of representatives on either side of the aisle voted against the majority position of their party.
The two articles approved by the House accused the president of lying under oath and of tampering with witnesses in obstruction of justice. The tone of the trial in the Republican-controlled Senate, an institution still somewhat governed by congeniality and bipartisanship, was less bitter than the House proceedings. Enough Republican senators joined the Democrats to acquit Clinton, with five senators voting against the article alleging obstruction of justice and ten voting against the article alleging perjury.
Causes
In 1978, Newt Gingrich was elected to a House of Representatives that had been under Democratic control for decades. A believer in the idea that all politics is a “war for power”, Gingrich made it his mission to break the long-standing spirit of cooperation in Congress which he believed had kept the Republicans from achieving conservative policy goals. Throughout the 1980s, the combative Congressman used the emerging cable news ecosystem to attack his Democratic colleagues with inflammatory language, describing them as “communists”, “corrupt”, “unpatriotic”, and “traitors”. His strategy paid off as a wave of Republicans were elected to the House of Representatives in 1994, elevating Gingrich to Speaker of the House. Having defeated the congressional Democrats, Gingrich turned to President Clinton and opened another front in his “war for power”.
For the duration of the Whitewater investigation, culminating in the president’s impeachment, Speaker Gingrich was an enthusiastic supporter of Starr’s independent counsel investigation and of the concurrent investigations by the Republican-chaired Senate Whitewater Committee and House Banking Committee. These congressional investigations ended by 1996 and failed to uncover conclusive evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the Clintons.
Nevertheless, Gingrich stayed firm, ignored the lack of evidence, and in the presidential election that year, used language that characterized the incumbent Clintons as flagrant criminals. As reported in the New York Times, at one event he described the Clinton Administration policy as, ”Break the law, bruise the law, cover it up, and then frankly lie about the cover-up.”
Following the special counsel investigation’s change of course in early 1998, high-ranking Republicans, including the leader of the party’s Senate conference, Senator Trent Lott, called for the Starr investigation to wrap-up. Again, Gingrich encouraged the special counsel to continue his work. The investigation drew on through 1998, leading to the revelations of the affair and Clinton’s impeachment later that year.
Throughout the impeachment inquiry, House Republicans simultaneously emphasized the salacious allegations of sexual impropriety against Clinton while pursuing a strictly legal rationale for his impeachment. Many legal scholars believe that impeachment is by design a popular and political process, not a strictly legal one. By narrowing the process to President Clinton’s legal violations, Republicans refused an attempt to construct a larger narrative about the president’s alleged breaches of public trust. Recognizing Clinton’s continued popularity, Republicans believed that this would not be a winning strategy, and that specifying their inquiry to only include President Clinton’s legal violations would be more successful.
Outcome
The highly partisan, combative, and uncompromising brand of politics that Newt Gingrich brought to the House of Representatives has since defined the American political landscape and how it is framed in the media. Many contemporary legal scholars expressed concern that Starr’s years-long investigation amounted to a perpetual presidential inquisition and an abuse of the original intent of the Watergate-era Independent Counsel Law.
By emphasizing legal violations in the articles and going forward with the process with no expectation of success, House Republicans established these practices as precedents which shape the modern perspective on presidential impeachment. The affair also exposed issues with the emerging 24-hour cable news-dominated media ecosystem. Eager to find the ‘new Watergate’, the media was inclined to emphasize speculation and scandal over fairly presenting the facts of the case.
Sustained public support for the president throughout the process shielded Clinton from a potential erosion of support from members of his own party who may have turned against him if their constituencies supported impeachment. This affair affirmed the power of a popular president against the ability of the legislative branch to serve as a check against the president.
Feature image: Tickets to the impeachment trial given to former President Gerald Ford and his wife (Source: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum)
