Chapter 122: Impeachment

1997-1998

The Future Republican Party came out in November, just in time for the New York Times Christmas list. As far as Newt Gingrich and some of the Republican powers were concerned, it was about as welcome as a loud and juicy fart in church. These guys were busy riding the white male vote, and the word that the fast and fun ride was going to stop was not welcome. I found myself doing the Sunday morning talk show circuit and having to face fellow Republicans who disagreed.

This took one of two forms. First were the academics, who argued that the trends I was quoting weren’t happening (No, the Latinos aren’t really growing that fast; no, people really weren’t moving to cities; no, etc. etc. etc.) Then you had the politicians, who tried to argue with a straight face that the Republican Party was inherently attractive to all Americans, including the minority groups. The real amusement came when the talk shows then brought out several minority leaders (a vice president of the NAACP and a director of the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference were particularly amusing) to argue about just how welcoming the Republicans were.

I think my best moment in the debate came one morning on Meet the Press. Russert asked me, “Congressman, some of your fellow Republicans are calling you too intellectual. Others say you are being pragmatic, and others are saying you’re too idealistic. How do you respond to these criticisms?”

I smiled and said, “Why can’t I be all three? Take immigration, for instance. The intellectual in me says that immigrants have a higher birth rate than native born Americans. The pragmatist in me tells me to appeal to this large and growing group of Americans. Most importantly, the idealist in me says that these people are crossing burning deserts and cramming into rusty cargo ships and riding leaky rafts and sailboats to get to this country. They look at America as a shining beacon to the rest of the world. I say to them, ‘Join us! Be part of us! Help us hold up this beacon!’ I say, from all three viewpoints, I can either be regressive, and hide in the past, or be progressive, and I choose to be progressive and face the future!”

Newt was not amused. I was violating the Eleventh Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not tell the truth if the truth goes against our talking points!’

He was still in charge of the House, and still had enough Republican Congressmen to give Clinton a boatload of grief. I couldn’t remember when it all came out on my first trip through, but the dam broke on the Lewinsky scandal by the end of 1997. In retrospect, I wondered on occasion if Newt was pushing this so hard to deflect from what I was saying about the party he ran. Kenneth Starr, who had started by investigating the Whitewater real estate mess the Clintons were involved in, just kept digging and digging. In this he was aided and abetted by Gingrich, who was convinced there had to be a smoking gun somewhere, and that he could use it to shoot Slick Willie. When the Office of the Independent Counsel was created, there was no limit on what he could investigate, or how much he could spend doing it.

As much as I despised James Carville, the man was right when he commented, ‘Drag enough hundred-dollar bills through the trailer park, and you’re bound to find something or other.’ Ken Starr was tossing hundred-dollar bills around left and right, and then leaking all the results directly to the right-wing media like the Drudge Report and Fox News. ‘Fair and balanced’ - my ass! Starr probably had these guys on speed dial.

So, for Bill Clinton’s 1997 Christmas present to his family, he gave them Monica Lewinsky and a semen-coated blue dress. To say it was a national scandal was to put it mildly. Hillary’s response was equally scandalous. Half the country wanted to see her divorce him, preferably on television, and the other half wanted it over, but couldn’t understand why she forgave him. I asked Marilyn if she would ‘stand by her man’ if I got caught cheating on her. She looked at me quizzically and responded, “Have you lost your mind?”

I smiled. “I take that as a negative.”

“Extremely negative!”

“As in, I’d be divorced before the dust settled?”

She smiled and pointed a finger at me. “Faster!”

I smiled back. “Then I guess I better not let you catch me.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing, dear.” I smirked at her.

“You behave!” she finished and threw in some finger waggings for extra emphasis.

Newt was milking this for all he was worth. He was demanding that Clinton be called before Congress to answer for his crimes. Exactly how cheating on your wife was a national crime was convoluted, to say the least. It involved the fact that he had said he wasn’t cheating on her and had therefore perjured himself in testimony before the Justice Department, through the Office of the Independent Counsel. Considering that the Counsel’s office was leaking like a sieve, if he had admitted to it, it would have been on the news before he had managed to get home.

Meanwhile Ken Starr kept digging. He wasn’t just investigating Bill; he was also investigating Hillary. The odds were that he was also investigating Chelsea. Considering she was only seventeen at the time, that seemed rather a pointless gesture, but I heard a whisper regardless. This was dragging on interminably. John Boehner told me that Newt was timing the whole thing so that it was going to conclude about the time of the mid-term elections.

John was still a friend and still talking to me, though he knew that Newt didn’t approve of that. John made up for it by going along with Gingrich on everything else. We were sitting in my home office in December of 1997, having a few drinks and talking shop one night. He was giving me Newt’s plans, since I was no longer in the inner circle.

I listened and nodded, and then asked him, “John, let me ask you something. Ever cheated on Debbie?”

“Carl! That’s a hell of a thing to ask!” he protested.

“Ain’t it though,” I responded. “You know, I don’t care. It’s not my business. It’s yours and your wife’s. Don’t you think this is the same thing?”

John had the decency to look uncomfortable at the question. Was it because he knew I was right, or because he had cheated on his wife? I didn’t know and really didn’t care. “That’s true, but it’s not about the cheating, it’s about the lying. That’s the crime.”

“That’s a subtle distinction, don’t you think? We aren’t destroying a man because he cheated on his wife, but because he lied about it? You don’t think that’s more than a little hypocritical coming out of the mouth of Newt Gingrich? He cheated on his first wife with his second, and from what I hear he’s doing the same with her. Gingrich keeps pushing this, it is going to come back and bite him in the ass, and probably not just him. There are going to be some heads rolling over this!”

“Carl, even if I agree with you, it doesn’t matter. Newt thinks this is a winner for him and for us. You have to admit, he’s been right so far,” argued my friend.

I shook my head. “No, he hasn’t been. We lost ten seats in the last election. We do it again and we have a one seat margin. Newt screwed up when he decided to shut the government down. This is a mistake also. We have almost a year before the election. Newt thinks he can keep up the outrage for the next ten months. Here’s what’s going to really happen. For the next few months, until sometime this summer, people are going to be outraged. After that, people are going to get sick and tired of it. The Clintons are going to get sympathy, you know, ‘It’s a private matter, leave them alone!’, that sort of thing. By the time Slick Willie turns Carville and the other attack dogs loose, people will be blaming Newt and the rest of us for this mess.”

“So, what would you have us do? We can’t let it drop. Newt won’t let it drop.”

“Hey, I didn’t say we shouldn’t use it to pressure the man. I’m just saying that this is going to go too far. You impeach the President for ordering break-ins and rigging elections. You don’t run an impeachment because he got a blowjob from an intern! That’s why they invented divorce, John!”

He shrugged and gave me a helpless gesture. “You know the man. What do you expect me to do?”

“Talk to people. I went to lunch with George Will last week, and Marilyn and I went to dinner with Tim Russert and his wife two nights ago. I talked to both about these sorts of situations. There is a definite life cycle to these things. At the start there is a lot of outrage. It builds and builds, but then after a while, everybody is sick and tired of it. After that, if you keep pushing, you start building sympathy for the person you are tormenting. ‘Can’t they leave that poor man alone?’, that sort of thing. Newt is going to keep pushing this long past the expiration date!” I told him.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Here’s something else to tell people. You know and I know, Newt ain’t the only fellow in Congress to have fooled around on his beloved spouse. If the press really is as liberal as you think it is, don’t you think somebody is going to start investigating Republican marital infidelities? Newt wants to push this into the November elections? It’s a poor sword that won’t cut both ways!”

John simply grunted at that.

Not much happened through the first half of 1998. As far as the Republican powers that be were concerned, I was assigned to the Committee on Purgatory and Limbo, although I kept on talking to people. There was a backlash building slowly against Gingrich and what he was trying to do. It was like a snowball; it just needed a little bit of help for it to start to roll down the hill and grow.

I remembered enough about politics from my first go to know that the actual impeachment proceedings of Clinton occurred during the lame duck session of Congress, following the mid-term elections, November thru December of 1998. Clinton would be charged in the House and be acquitted in the Senate. This time around, Gingrich rushed things. Sensing that the public was tiring of his endless carping, he decided to go for broke, and impeach Clinton before the election. I heard from several people that Newt had commissioned several very private polls that were telling him what he wanted to hear - we would pick up two dozen or more seats in the House, and half that many in the Senate, more than making up the losses we suffered in 1996. The drama of televised impeachment hearings would make up for the disgust with the political process the general electorate was feeling.

The response from my fellow Congressmen, on both sides of the aisle, was muted at best. The overall consensus was that nobody needed the grief during an election year. The Democrats were worried that if Clinton could be impeached, it would hurt them November 3^rd, and if he wasn’t impeached, it still wouldn’t help. Curiously, more than a few Republicans considered the whole thing one of the tawdriest spectacles they had ever seen and wanted no part of it. Only the most rabid or tactically minded of my party welcomed this. Most of us thought this was the most incredible distraction to our real job of getting elected again.

As for re-election, I was running against the mayor of Westminster, a fellow named Jerry Herzinski. I had known Jerry for several years, and he decided to throw his hat in the ring. While I wasn’t taking the election for granted, I had to admit that Jerry was nowhere near as tough an opponent as Steve Rymark had been two years ago. Jerry had the Democratic machine going for him, and a decent enough record as a small-town mayor. Unfortunately, when God was handing out charisma, Jerry was standing behind the door and got passed by. Watching and listening to paint dry was more exciting than listening to Jerry give a speech. He had a decent enough war chest for ads, but the man was simply boring! I couldn’t ignore him, but every independent poll had me beating him by double digits.