The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers
of the United States, shall be removed from
Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason,
Bribery, or other high Crimes and
Misdemeanors.
-United States Constitution,
Article II, section 4
Men, in public trust, will much oftener act in such
a manner as to make them unworthy of being any
longer trusted than in such a manner as to make
them obnoxious to legal punishment.
-Alexander Hamilton
The last line of the Declaration of Independence
is: 'And for the support of this Declaration, with a
firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,
we mutually pledge to each other our Lives,
our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.' Impeachment
isn't a revolution, and no one's lives or fortunes
are at risk. It's not even our sacred honor this
time. It's just a question of whether the country can
patch together a little self-respect.
The Founding Fathers said the price of liberty is
eternal vigilance. This book isn't even asking for
vigilance. It's just asking people to give a damn.
If Americans don't care about this, then they are
expecting liberty without paying any price at all.
-Ann Coulter, High
Crimes and Misdemeanors
There was a time, as recently as about fifteen years ago, when all the fab' babes were on the other side. Before the current generation of young folks, who not coincidentally came of age during the Reagan years, the Republican Party was seemingly the exclusive province of square men. We were the party of guys like Bob Taft & Barry Goldwater in their horn-rimmed glasses, of bald guys like Ike & Gerry Ford, of crew cut guys like Haldeman & Ehrilchman, of complete doofuses like Nixon. We weren't just the party of men, but the party of old men. We were the Father Party. Sure we had the occasional snappy dish--Margaret Thatcher, Ayn Rand, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Phyllis Schlafly, et. al--but they tended to be a tad severe. Democrats, for a variety of reasons, were the party of women, of the young, and of the cool guys (not "cool" from the perspective of other men, but the guys, like the Kennedys and Bill Clinton, who were smooth with the ladies).
I can't pinpoint the precise moment when this all changed, but that it has changed is a certainty, and this became obvious during the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Suddenly, instead of just having our usual bland, middle-aged, white, spokesmen, like Bill McCollum and Arlen Specter (both perfectly adequate, but hardly electrifying), whenever you turned on the television there was another attractive-young-blonde-conservative-woman : Peggy Noonan, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Monica Crowley, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, Barbara Olson, to name a few. And not only were they a-y-b-c-w's, they were also extremely bright and frighteningly aggressive. (Coulter, Ingraham and Olson are all attorneys, and clerked for big time judges and Crowley attended the nation's premier institution of higher learning, Colgate University.) It's common enough for TV's talking heads to be chosen for their looks, more than for their intellects, but this crew had the whole package. I saw a couple of appearances by Ann Coulter where I thought her opponents were going to either start crying or hide under a table--she knew more than they did, held her views more strongly, and enunciated them more vociferously.
Meanwhile, who was left to defend Bill Clinton ? Bald guys like Carville. Gay guys like Barney Frank. Severe women like Hilary, Donna Shalala, and Anne Lewis. Dweeby guys like Henry Waxman and Lanny Davis. There may still have been enough women in the Democratic Party for Bill Clinton to chase a few around the Oval Office, but, mirabile dictu, the smokin' hot, brainy chicks in town were finally on our side. And lest this seem like a pure creation of television, we were treated a few years later to the spectacle of the Million Mom March, a bizarre gathering of humorless women being harangued by the likes of Rosie O'Donnell about the evil of guns. The whole thing resembled nothing so much as the "Two Minute Hate" from George Orwell's 1984. They come off particularly badly when contrasted with the competing rally by the Second Amendment Sisters, a raucous conclave of conservative women devoted to preserving gun rights. In this perfect bit of political allegory, the Democrats had become the Mother Party, while the GOP was the party of pistol-packing sisters, and other peoples' sisters at that.
Just how stunning a turn of events this was is readily apparent from the hysterical reaction of the Left Wing press, which has either dismissed or attacked this new breed of conservative women. A particularly vile, but unfortunately not unique, manifestation of this trend was the Salon.com essay suggesting that Ann Coulter needed to find a man. There is, of course, a delicious irony in these sexist attacks on conservative women; just imagine the howls of outrage if the perpetrators were conservatives. We'd never hear the end of it.
Any question though about the talents of Ms Coulter are ably answered in this book, which lays out, with devastating clarity and biting sarcasm, the case for the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Several years after the fact, the presentation of the many Clinton scandals (up until 1998) may seem a tad tiresome, but Coulter lays out the facts (as they were known at the time) in the succinct and logical fashion that a good prosecutor would use. One is tempted to believe--unable, as I am, to escape delusion--that had the actual impeachment case been explained this well, it might have garnered more support. Then too, it is so persuasive that some of the bitterness of her invective seems out of place, however justified. Far be it from me to defend Bill Clinton, but comparisons to OJ Simpson seem overdone, and unnecessary in light of the actual behavior she nails the President on. The other quibble with the book is mostly a function of when she wrote it : she repeatedly attacks the GOP dominated Congress for not impeaching the President, which they, of course, did within months of the publication of the book.
But these criticisms are minor in comparison to the great praise she deserves, not just for arguing the facts so well, but more importantly, for her compelling argument that Impeachment is (was) justified based on those facts. The book's greatest value may lie in this uniquely cogent brief for the proposition that Impeachment was not viewed by the Founders as a radical solution to an unlikely set of events, but was instead intended to be a regular part of Constitutional government, allowing for the efficient removal of a President (or other official) who has not even necessarily done something illegal or provably criminal, but has simply betrayed the public trust. Regardless of your partisan political leanings or your personal opinion of Bill Clinton, it's awfully hard to argue that having sex with an intern in the Oval Office, trying to get her to lie about it in exchange for a job, trying to get her to suborn the perjury of her friend (Linda Tripp), and lying about it yourself under oath (in the Paula Jones case), are not betrayals of that trust. In fact, just strip everything away except for the incontrovertible fact that the President of the United States had an extramarital affair with a twenty-one year old employee : this alone is, or should be, sufficient justification for impeachment. If you doubt it, imagine yourself trying to muster the chutzpah to ask George Washington if he thinks it's sufficient.
This return to first principles is especially useful because the President's defenders ignored all principles and instead argued technicalities ad nauseum (what is the meaning of "is" ? what is the meaning of sexual relations ? etc.), turning the entire process into little more than a legalistic game : no 100% certain criminal liability = no impeachment. To counter this, Coulter looks at the history of impeachments here and in Britain, at the specific meaning of the "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" language, and at the writings of the Founders, to demonstrate that it is not the intent of the Constitution to shield the President in all but those rare cases where he has demonstrably engaged in illegal activity, but instead to allow the citizenry to replace a President whom they can no longer trust.
While noting that this more relaxed standard might be susceptible to abuse, though of course the stricter standard is too, Coulter is careful to argue that the impeachable actions must not be merely politically unpopular or mere mistakes. Though not necessarily a criminal standard, impeachable actions should violate a moral standard. She quotes Madison to the effect that :
The aim of every political constitution is, or ought
to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess
most wisdom to discern and most virtue to pursue
the common good of the society; and in the next
place, to take the most effectual precautions for
keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold
their public trust.
This will sound quaint and unrealistic to many; why after all would we sophisticated moderns even expect a President to be virtuous ? But if we don't expect them to be and we don't hold them to this standard, then we have no one to blame but ourselves when they disdain virtue. As she puts it herself :
[I]mpeachment is not just a matter of legal technicalities. It is a matter of our duty as citizens.
Republicans, most of them anyway, did finally see fit to do that duty, but were never able to convince the public or the Democrats that it was a shared duty.
Unfortunately for the country, it is one of the defining characteristics of Bill Clinton that he eventually proves his critics right, no matter how outrageous their charges may seem at first glance. And so, in the waning days of his presidency we were all treated to a hard lesson in the consequences of not removing such a miscreant from office. Having sanctioned, either explicitly or implicitly, adultery, sodomy, sexual assault, bribery, bank fraud, misuse of the IRS and FBI, obstruction of justice, perjury, spurious and dilatory claims of executive privilege, and even something approaching treason, the public and Democrats were left mouthing empty protestations of shock when the departing Bill Clinton sold pardons, stole the White House furniture, and headed off to play a racially exclusive golf course. Having spent eight years defining deviancy downwards, to protect Bill Clinton, it may have been disgusting to discover how low we'd gone, but it surely wasn't surprising.
There's more than enough blame to go around when we start parceling
out responsibility for the degradation of the presidency that occurred
in the Clinton years, but among those who deserve none, Ann Coulter stands
out. No one has stated the case for impeachment better, nor enunciated
a clearer rationale for how impeachment should be used in general.
America has paid, and will continue to pay, a high price for reading the
phrase "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" as an exalted, nigh unreachable,
technical threshold. In the future, we must follow the counsel of
Ms Coulter and return to the original meaning of the phrase. Like
the other features of the Constitution, it is intended to be used, with
some regularity, as a check on unfit officials. The drafters of the
Constitution well understood that precautions were necessary to guard against
such people; it is we who seem to have forgotten.
(Reviewed:08-Mar-01)
Grade: (A-)
