Last night confirmed two things. We are really two nations, and the
only nation that is really part of the political conversation is the
nation that votes, benefits from the stock market and is the beneficiary of
the strong economy. The other nation is in the inner cities, the
dysfunctional public schools and the growing number of layoffs. The
real crisis in America is the 15 million children at risk, losing the
next generation. He had nothing to say about that. When he talked about
the “new dawn in America,” nobody applauded, not even the Democrats. He
sounded so preposterous. To talk about the prosperity of one America —
those benefiting from the stock market and identified with a new dawn
for the whole country — is such hubris. I can’t understand why everybody’s
going around saying this was a great performance just because he was
able to get through his speech without stumbling.

It’s also amazing to what extent he’s become the president of the worst of
corporate America. Because Clinton is a compassionate, caring, feeling-your-pain
Democrat, he has somehow legitimized the neglect. If it were Reagan who
gave that State of the Union address and ignored the problems of those
most in need, there would be riots.

The moment where he honored Hillary was incredibly embarrassing. If
we’re going to be asking, as people should, for a clear demarcation line
between the public and the private realms, politicians have to help.
It’s an inappropriate expression at this time — it brings up all that
happened and all the ways he has dishonored her. No wonder she looked so
stone-faced. I would have thrown something at him.

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Ben Cohen, president of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities and
co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream:

The president’s speech was long on talk about education and pretty short on
money for it. It looks like 50 percent of the discretionary money he was
talking about is going to end up going to the Pentagon. I’d give him high
marks for what he’s trying to do for Medicaid and Social Security, but the
education stuff was a bunch of talk and didn’t have the money behind it.

Our country needs about $7 billion a year to provide Head Start for all the
kids who are eligible but can’t afford a spot in it. We need about $100
billion worth of repairs for our schools that are falling apart in a lot of
parts of the country. Meanwhile, he’s going to give the Pentagon more than
$100 billion over the next five years despite the fact that we’ve got far
and away the best military in the world. Now that the Soviet Union is no
longer a threat, between all of them combined — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria,
North Korea and Cuba — they spend a total of about $15 billion a year.
There’s no reason why we should have to spend $280 billion a year to defend
ourselves against them. That’s the way it looks from Ben Cohen land.

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Deirdre English, former editor of Mother Jones magazine:

Clinton is like an Internet stock: He’s all puffed up and when he goes down a little and loses a little air, you think he would be in the pink, but when he comes back up, he balloons back up bigger than ever. That’s his style — he’s at his best when he’s in trouble, when he has to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

The Republicans were so stodgy and so obsessed with their hatred of him that they couldn’t even applaud for public schools. They looked pathetic, possessed with their witch hunt. I expected Clinton to take advantage of this opportunity to make the whole impeachment trial look like the Republicans were dragged down in the trial. And he did. Things like “Where he touched her for the purpose of arousing her?” are extremely unimportant against the large millennial picture that he painted.

I support his agenda, and I would support a more liberal one. But I don’t think he can win those things. I don’t think there’s any question that his presidency has been compromised by the Lewinsky scandal. I don’t think Clinton should be impeached — the crimes he’s accused of don’t rise to impeachable offenses. On the other hand, I do think his behavior in the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal has been unforgivable. I think feminists have been giving him too much of a pass on that. Clinton was prepared to ruin her life over this. How many women have had their lives destroyed because powerful men have denied their situation and left them to hang out to dry?

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Mike Collins, press secretary for the Republican National Committee:

Much of the speech was a rehash of proposals that were floated a year ago and never heard from again. I can’t say that I saw anything that was surprising. It was very similar to last year’s address, both in tone, length and content. I would hope the president meant what he said about reaching over the table and working with Republicans on things like saving Social Security, saving the public schools, lowering the tax burdens on working families and shoring up our national defenses. But everything else was already known — even the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the tobacco companies has been out there for at least a year.

I’m pleased that the president is talking about giving some of the surplus back to the people who earned it, but I think what we need is across-the-board tax relief, not gimmicks or narrow loopholes. A person deserves to keep more of the money he or she earns in the form of tax relief.

We agree with the president on fixing Social Security, but not an approach that gives government more control over our retirement income. We want to work with him on an approach that puts you more in control of your retirement income. We also believe that school decisions should be made by local administrators, teachers and parents because they care more about those kids, know what the local needs are and are in a better position to address them.

The empty seats were kicking up in the last half hour, and it’s typical that members will leave toward the end because they have been booked already to do television or radio feeds. That happens all the time — it wasn’t political. I think this time the cameras tended to look at them, but those seats were filled for much of the speech.

 
POLICY EXPERTS

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Social Security

Puts $2.8 trillion (62 percent) of projected budget surpluses of the next
15 years into Social Security coffers. Up to 25 percent would be invested
in the stock market and the Social Security system would be stabilized at
least through 2055.

Hans Riemer is director of the 2030 Center, a public policy organization for young adults that focuses on Social Security and modern workplace issues.

Clinton is putting forth very broad recommendations for strengthening Social Security that will be very good for young adults. Clinton has turned away from the idea of privatization, wherein you would replace the existing Social Security program with individual investment accounts. The new savings accounts he is proposing are an addition to Social Security, something we’ve been promoting for a while. As this money earns interest over time, people will retire with more money.

But the program adds 25 percent to the Social Security budget through the projected federal budget surplus, and my biggest concern is that we would be too dependent upon that surplus. We’re now going to credit $2.7 trillion of our surplus over the next 20 years into Social Security, but it could be fixed without any new money. The surplus might not materialize entirely, and if it doesn’t, this program would require a commitment of general revenue. There’s also a lack of any plan on increasing the FICA cap and applying the payroll tax a little bit more fairly to upper-income workers.

But I really think that once this gets into serious debate, the conservatives that oppose this idea are going to self-destruct.

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Health Care

Redirects $650 billion of the projected budget surplus over the next 15
years to preserve Medicare through 2020. Also allows Americans aged 55 to 65
to buy into Medicare if they can’t find other insurance; provides $1
billion over five years to help the nation’s 32 million uninsured; and
includes a $2 billion initiative to help disabled keep their health
benefits — which might otherwise be difficult to obtain — as they return to
the work force.

Larry Levitt is director of the Changing Healthcare Marketplace Project at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and former senior health policy for the Clinton administration.

Clinton’s coming back with his proposal from last year to allow people 55 to 64 to buy into Medicare. There would also be tax credits for small businesses to encourage them to offer insurance through purchasing cooperatives; $2 billion in tax credits to help the disabled go back to work; and $1 billion in grants for the uninsured.

A billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, but it doesn’t go very far in terms of buying people health insurance. There is the recognition that we are probably a long way from universal coverage and the administration is making itsy-bitsy steps toward it. The intent behind this proposal is to make the safety net work better so that when you don’t have health insurance, if you need to go to a hospital or community health center, those organizations have the infrastructure to deal with the rising number of uninsured. The vast majority of the uninsured are either working for themselves or are in a family where someone is working. They are not the poorest of the poor, because, by and large, we cover the poor through Medicaid and other programs. It’s really the lower middle class who get squeezed.

These proposals are place holders, sort of down payments, for much larger amounts that are required to really make a dent in the problem. The reality, for example, with the small business tax credits, is that even if you offer them, not very many people take them. It is a huge issue of affordability for small businesses. To buy health insurance for the family of a worker, it costs upwards of $6,000 a year now. Even if you offer a tax credit for half of that cost, it still means the small business has to pick up the other $3,000 dollars. Not many can afford even that much.

But a couple of the proposals are quite large. The continuation of health coverage for the disabled to go back to work is an extremely important and significant initiative. The tax breaks for people who provide long-term care to elderly relatives is also. For a person struggling, $1,000 is a lot of money. And while $1 billion is not going to solve the problems of the uninsured, it is important symbolically to say they are still out there and their numbers are growing in the best economy we have had in the postwar era. That problem still exists, and we need to take every possible step to deal with it.

What’s missing is any comprehensive proposal to cover the uninsured, to provide universal coverage. The health-care reform debate of the early ’90s gave universal coverage a bad name, and it’s going to take a while to get back to a larger discussion like that.
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Defense

Increases defense spending by $12 billion in 2000 and a total of $110
billion over the next six years for military modernization and readiness.

Steve Koziak is director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a military think tank in Washington.

There is more on defense than there has been in the past, since it is a bigger issue. They want to add $12 billion to defense in 2000 and an additional $110 billion over the next six years for modernization and readiness. The money is in addition to what they were already planning to spend. But it’s not clear how much is actually a real increase in defense spending, since $4 billion would be increased purchasing power because of lower inflation estimates and another $4 billion would come from shifting money from low-priority projects, and other places they can save, into these areas.

Modernization funding is a catchword for new weapons and includes research, development and procurement and production of new weapon systems. Readiness spending covers the costs of training, keeping the systems functioning and providing health care for military personnel. Since the end of the Cold War, procurement has gone down about 70 percent from the height of the Reagan buildup. The spending was appropriately cut at the end of the Cold War.

But do we need to keep about 1.4 million troops in the military and have a modernization program that includes procurement? Too much of the emphasis here is on old military ideas — they should look at more areas where they can upgrade current-generation weapon systems rather than buy new ones, which are two to three times as expensive as those they are replacing.

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Elaine Donnelly is president of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy organization specializing in military personnel issues.

I‘m afraid I took down my Christmas decorations too soon — everybody should have kept their Christmas tree up as a symbol of this State of the Union speech. It was just one bauble after another being displayed on the television screen.

I listened carefully to the statements that the president made on defense and I found that they really ring rather hollow. To say that we support the troops, that we will give them the resources that they need — when you look at the record of this administration, you see the contrary. All the major funding that he’s proposing for the next six years would come in well after he’s gone — and so the promise is not likely to be kept.

I think this president, with the example that he is setting for the troops under his command, is probably the worst commander in chief in history. The effect that this president and the precedent his behavior is setting for the military is going to be a disaster if the Senate does not intervene and remove him from office. The very essence of military discipline is being destroyed.

I think trying to turn this highly publicized media event into a tool to deflect the deliberation of the Senate in the middle of a historic trial is unseemly; it’s just one of many things this president has done that is not at all appropriate. But then again, what do you expect from a president like Bill Clinton? He doesn’t have that deep-seated respect for the office. He’s very different in that regard and that’s probably one of the reasons why he’s only the second president in history to be impeached.

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Child Care

Subsidizes child care by an additional $7.5 billion over the next five
years, provides an additional $3 billion for early learning programs and
gives a tax credit of up to $250 per child age 1 or younger to families,
including those with a stay-at-home parent.

Helen Blank is director of child-care programs at the Children’s
Defense Fund, a children’s advocacy group.

The entire child-care package would represent a significant step toward putting in place some of the support families and children need in order to go to school ready to succeed. The initiatives entail new help for low-income families to afford child care; new funds to strengthen the quality of care for very young children; a significant increase in funds for after-school programs so children can be safe; an increased tax credit for lower- and middle-income families with increased child-care costs, as well as parents who choose to stay home with children under age 1; a continuation of funds that were approved last year to improve the quality of child care; and a tax credit for businesses who are interested in contributing to child care. It’s a pretty well-rounded package.

There’s not enough money to provide every low-income family with child-care assistance; or to insure that all child-care providers get a decent wage; or to support the nearly 5 million children who are home alone after school. But it is a recognition of the job that mothers do, who choose to stay home.

If it does pass, we have to help the states implement it and see what gaps remain. We have gaping holes in child care. Only one in 10 children in eligible families who need child-care assistance get it. The average child-care worker makes $12,000 a year. We have training requirements that are absolutely tiny for people who work in child-care centers. You need 1,500 hours of training to manicure someone’s nails, but in 40 states you can work in a family child-care home with no child development training whatsoever. We have a very long way to go, especially if we want our education goals to succeed, because the early years are where children develop their pre-literacy skills and get ready to read. We have a pretty shameful situation in this country. But this would be a big step toward moving in the right direction.

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Education

Includes measures to bring more accountability to schools by ending social
promotion, requiring progress reports on school performance, providing
better competency testing and training for teachers and adopting more
stringent student disciplinary policies.

Kathy Christie is spokeswoman for the policy information clearinghouse at the Education Commission of the States in Denver.

The proposals concern reforming schools, class-size reduction and incentives to our schools to expand professional development and make sure teachers are better qualified. Nearly all the types of initiatives he’s talking about already exist — they may not be in all states, but they are all in some. Things like accountability — that schools report on their performance to the public — are in nearly every state. Over half the states already require teachers to be certified.

This proposal is different in that the typical role of the federal government in education has been focused on students with special needs and low-income students. They’ve been more about equity and providing services that have come out of federal mandates. The new proposals address things like teacher quality that haven’t been addressed by the federal government in the past. Most of the states are working independently on their own set of requirements — this funding will merely supplement what they are able to fund.

The federal amount that goes to the states is not terrifically consequential. The majority of all funding still comes from state and local governments.

Democrats, who are themselves proposing the formal condemnation of their
leader, and who readily describe him as a reprehensible sinner and
irresponsible cad, are nonetheless engaged in a desperate battle to
prevent removal. From a purely partisan political view, however,
impeachment is surely their most desirable option: Get Clinton out of
the way as quickly as possible and bring in Al Gore, the heir apparent.
This would position the party for the best possible shot at the White
House in 2000. Instead, the congressional Democrats have shown a
fierce and inexplicable loyalty to a man who has had no loyalty to them.
In the course of his administration, Clinton has showed no hesitation in
betraying some of their most cherished programs (welfare), cutting
crucial deals (NAFTA, balanced budget) with their enemies and generally
pursuing policies that can best be described as Republican lite.

Despite the offensive and often preposterous moral arrogance with which
the Democrats have flayed their political opponents, it is difficult to
pinpoint any clear principle that would explain their position. Of late,
the flatulent rantings of party myrmidons Barney Frank, John Conyers and
Maxine Waters have been distilled into the accusation that House
Republicans are conducting a “political coup d’état.” It is a phrase
meant to convey the impression that the Republican House is seeking to
overthrow the will of the voters and reverse the effects of two popular
elections. Well, on such grounds no president could ever be impeached.
But it is an even stranger charge coming from left-wingers who have
never had a second thought about their impeachment of Richard Nixon,
which reversed the elections of 1968 and 1972. The latter, by the way,
was won by a larger majority than any Democrat has ever received. It is
stranger still that people who fought on principle to reverse the will
of a majority who supported the Vietnam War should have so little
respect for Republicans trying to assert a moral principle in the face
of adverse polls.

But this is only the beginning of what might be generously termed the
Democratic hypocrisies in the current debates. Opponents of impeachment,
like Elizabeth Holtzman, stress the harm that the process might inflict
on the country. Excuse me? Wasn’t it the Holtzman Democrats who launched
the impeachment process over a third-rate burglary in the midst of a
war? Is there any Democrat who has voiced second thoughts about the
Watergate inquiries? Wasn’t it an extreme step to terminate a president who had run the country well for six years and remained popular with the majority of the voting public until the moment his own party turned against him? Suppose that a few honorable Democrats were to step forward now to provide the concrete evidence of Clinton’s obstructions of justice (as White House counsel John Dean did then) and to raise a nonpartisan voice in support of his removal (as Howard Baker and others did then) — what do you think that would do to the current poll numbers?

Even more hypocritical are the Democrats’ current attacks on
Republicans as “sexual McCarthyists” invading the privacy of the
president, supporting a prurient witch hunt by a special prosecutor not
limited by budgetary constraints. But it was the Democrats who invented
the special prosecutor in the first place to criminalize their
political opponent. And it was the Democratic majority that recently
reauthorized the enabling legislation when it expired. Who among the
Democrats complained when Lawrence Walsh went on his fishing expeditions
during the Reagan administration, dropping an indictment on Defense
Secretary Caspar Weinberger days before the 1988 presidential elections
and lynching dedicated civil servants in such a clumsy fashion that most
of his important convictions were reversed?

Who invented “sexual McCarthyism,” moreover, if not Democrats? The feminist left and the Democratic majority were architects of the very
sexual harassment legislation that allows the court discovery of
personal histories and prior acts, the innovation that ensnared
Clinton and resulted in the outing of Monica Lewinsky. What Democrat has
publicly apologized to Clarence Thomas for the actions of the Democratic
Judiciary Committee that agreed to a public hearing of charges that
could never be substantiated, about private words allegedly exchanged
10 years in the past, when the only effect would be the tarnishing of
the reputation of a perfectly decent human being who had 20
unblemished years of public service under his belt?

Far from being contrite, feminist leaders and Clinton supporters such as
Betty Friedan have the shamelessness to describe the current
investigation of Clinton’s harassment of female employees as the
activity of “dirty old white men” amounting to “no big deal.” Tell that
to the six career admirals and hundreds of enlisted men who were
dishonorably demoted or retired for attending a convention in Las Vegas
where, as far as they or any court were aware (with one questionable
exception) only consensual sex took place between of-age adults.

Equally unattractive has been the spectacle of an emerging strict
constructionism among people whose only prior interest in the
Constitution was to rewrite it. “These offenses do not rise to the level
of impeachment” has become a familiar mantra for people who couldn’t be
less concerned as to whether a “right to privacy” (and thus a
constitutional basis for Roe vs. Wade) could be found in the document. Yet now they insist with every pious fiber of their being that the
Constitution does not permit impeachment for these acts of Clinton’s.

How intriguing it is to watch a Sheila Jackson Lee or a Jerry Nadler
declare in the most solemn tones that the bar must be raised suitably
high, that Congress can only impeach for “high crimes and
misdemeanors.” It is a joy to behold the multiple inflections on that
particular term. Misdemeanors. Obviously, if the founders employed a
term generally applied to acts that from a criminal perspective are
minor, they had something else in mind than limiting impeachable
offenses to treason and similar high crimes against the state.

In fact, there was some pretty learned testimony before the House
committee to this effect. A high misdemeanor, as one could have guessed,
is an act akin to “conduct unbecoming” a public leader, the
commander in chief. Such conduct could be, for example, running up
Pennsylvania Avenue in the buff. If a sitting president were caught committing such an act, it would surely impinge on his ability to
be entrusted with the welfare and security of 300 million souls. And
this would be true even though indecent exposure is not a high crime,
and no matter what his current standing in the polls.

In Federalist Papers No. 65, Alexander Hamilton explained the object of
impeachment as “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of
public men” that violate the “public trust.” According to Hamilton, such
offenses are “political” in nature, “as they relate chiefly to injuries
done immediately to the society itself.” Examples might include
engaging in private behavior that makes one vulnerable to political
blackmail, or deliberately lying to the public and the government in
such a way as to derail national policy for eight months in order to
protect oneself from the embarrassment of a personal fault. They might
also include injuring the credibility of the office to such an extent
that even when the president makes a proper decision to commit American
military forces, significant audiences at home and abroad necessarily
suspect his motives, a fact that diminishes the effectiveness of
American power and the security of the United States.

A terse summary of impeachable behavior can be found even in sources
opposed to impeachment, such as the New York Times editorial on
Dec. 12. It was written a few days before the first scheduled
impeachment vote and just before air strikes were launched against
Iraq. Moderates who wanted to oppose the impeachment vote had asked the
president for a frank admission that he had lied under oath. In their
eyes, such an admission would constitute a crucial step toward
restoring the integrity of his office (assuming, of course, that it
could be restored). Clinton refused. Faced with the choice of continuing
to lie to save his own skin and coming clean for the sake of his
country, he chose to lie again. Commented the Times: “Whatever happens
in Congress, Mr. Clinton’s defiance and his willingness to gamble on a
Senate showdown look a lot like the behavior that got him into this mess
– irresponsible, self-destructive and dangerously out of place in the
Oval Office.”

The phrase “dangerously out of place in the Oval Office” is what
Republicans have been trying to communicate to their Democratic
colleagues on the Judiciary Committee, and the nation at large, as a
working definition of impeachable acts. Mr. Clinton has committed acts
that, in other contexts, might be viewed as merely crude,
irresponsible or dishonorable — mere misdemeanors. But in the Oval
Office they may constitute a danger to untold individuals and ultimately
to the nation itself. In short, they become “high” misdemeanors, and therefore
impeachable offenses.

In fact, somewhere deep in their hearts, the Democrats understand this.
The censure motion they have drafted is drawn almost verbatim from
Hamilton’s paper and charges that the president “violated the trust of
the American people” and “dishonored the office which they have
entrusted to him.”

But even amid the chaos, divisions remained obvious between those segments of the GOP who relished their drive for impeachment and those set to vote to impeach the president only reluctantly, if at all. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott quickly came out against Clinton’s move on Iraq, while retiring Rep. Gerald Solomon, R-N.Y., accused him of playing “Wag the Dog.” “Never underestimate a desperate president,” Solomon thundered. “This time he means business. What option is left for getting impeachment off the front page and maybe even postponed?” But such politicking wasn’t playing well in the offices of GOP moderates, where aides reached early Wednesday evening expressed dismay over the more aggressively critical attacks on the president’s decision.

Afraid that a prolonged delay of the impeachment vote might slow their momentum, House GOP leaders signaled Wednesday evening that the vote will only be delayed briefly, likely coming no later than Monday, and possibly sooner. Any further delay will push the measure well into Christmas week, when some might resist tackling such unpleasant business. But postponing the vote until after the holidays means it will become the business of the 106th Congress, where Democrats have at least five more votes, and the hard-line Republican leadership seems unlikely to let the issue get away.

For the GOP, pressing the impeachment vote under present circumstances is a risky strategy. But the pro-impeachment strategy the GOP has been pushing with increasing aggressiveness in recent weeks was already a high-stakes gamble, and the pressure that had already been applied to wavering moderate Republicans was fierce. Some continued to protest. “It’s going to be like the government shutdowns,” one frustrated House GOP staffer told Salon. But few Republicans were willing to concede, even off the record, that the GOP will face such bitter consequences for impeaching the president. And in the echo-chamber environment that Washington has become over the last week, some had apparently convinced themselves that there will be little price to pay, even though polls still show that almost two-thirds of the public remains firmly opposed to impeachment.

Why have moderate Republicans been lining up to declare their support for impeachment? The answer lies in a particularly brutal night-of-the-long-knives politics that has been practiced by pro-impeachment Republicans in the House, which has carried the day over the objections of the moderates.

Ever since the Republicans took over the House in 1994, a group of roughly 40 Republican moderates, predominantly from the Northeast, have served as a sort of electoral canary in a coal mine, signaling the House Republicans by their defection when the party’s agenda became too noxiously conservative for the country as a whole. That’s what happened during the government shutdowns of 1995; and it happened again in 1996 when the moderates agreed to raise the minimum wage and abandoned the GOP’s rabidly anti-environmental party line. Jack Quinn, perhaps the quintessential Northeastern moderate, told me last August that decisions like that had “saved the majority” for the GOP.

But over the last week and a half, the word has gone out to Republican congressmen across the country that on the question of impeachment, there can be no compromise. Even Quinn, who until the weekend had been counted as dead set against impeachment, jumped shipped and announced on Tuesday that he would vote for it.

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Much has been made of the pressure being applied by Tom DeLay, the House Majority Whip, who is now, for all practical purposes, the acting speaker. But for many of the moderates, DeLay’s fierce discipline appears to be less important than the overwhelming pressure being applied by conservative activists around the country. As GOP campaign consultant Jay Severin told me early Wednesday, Republican activists are making it clear that they will “never forgive and never forget” a vote against impeachment.

All week, wavering moderates have been told how they would face well-financed primary opponents in 2000 and become persona non grata in party ranks. And if they had any hopes of seeking higher office later on, forget it. As Severin put it, the moderates are being told to choose between getting “a broken arm, for sure, today or maybe getting a broken arm two years from now” at the polls. Given that choice, most are making an uneasy walk to the microphone and signing on to the impeachment express, hoping voters forget about breaking their arms in 2000. As soon as the impeachment vote is concluded, Severin told me, he plans to conduct a nationwide search for candidates who are willing to run against Republicans who say that they believe Clinton lied under oath and yet still vote against impeachment. He even plans to offer his services pro bono.

Of course, few of those who have opted for impeachment would speak openly about the pressure or the threats they’re receiving. But look at the discipline being meted out to those who’ve decided not to play ball: Amo Houghton and Peter King, both of New York. Of the roughly two dozen GOP moderates who only recently seemed inclined to vote against impeachment, only those two have remained unwavering opponents of impeachment.

Soon after Houghton announced in a New York Times editorial Dec. 9 that he would oppose impeachment, a die-hard conservative announced he’d be challenging Houghton for his seat in 2000. King, who has been the most prominent Republican fighting against impeachment, has come under even more withering fire, in part perhaps because he is actually rather conservative, on policy grounds. It was one thing when a couple dozen other House Republicans stood with King in opposition to impeachment. But now that he stands almost alone, all of the animus is being directed at him, and the depth of the anger is palpable.

King went on television Tuesday evening, hanging tough but clearly wearied by the mounting attacks from within his own party. He told CNBC that anonymous Republicans in one Capitol Hill newsletter, Congress Daily, had threatened to make the next two years the “longest two years of my life.” And plans are already being made to challenge King when he next runs for reelection in 2000. Jay Severin, who has offered his services to any King challenger, says, “Peter King should be impeached!”

Given the stiff rebuke the Republicans received at the polls last month, it may seem difficult to comprehend why they would willingly line up for impeachment once again only little more than a month later. But consultants and party regulars have been telling wavering moderates that despite the fact that two-thirds of the public opposes impeachment, the remaining one-third votes in disproportionately greater numbers. The zeal of the pro-impeachment forces, in other words, will make up for their relative lack of numbers. Of course, the only problem with this advice is that it is more or less the same reasoning that kept Republicans hammering away at Clinton in last month’s election, which led to their drubbing. Some GOP moderates are starting to realize that whatever they do, Clinton will probably end up keeping his job, thanks to the Senate — and maybe Saddam Hussein — but they may not.

It may well be true that voters in swing districts will not be focusing on this impeachment vote when November 2000 rolls around. But the danger is really not so much that individual members will be punished. The threat for the Republicans is rather that by moving ahead with impeachment, a majority of voters in California, the Midwest and the Northeast may finally conclude that the Republican Party simply cannot be trusted to govern responsibly or remain sensitive to the wishes of the majority of the people.

The strike against Iraq has raised the stakes for both sides. Clinton could be vulnerable to perceptions that he used the crisis with Iraq to get him off the hook in the House, although prominent leaders in both parties — including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde and outgoing Speaker Newt Gingrich — have disputed such claims. But if Republicans continue to move against a still-popular president during a military crisis, they risk a political backlash that voters will remember in November 2000.

Later, like many of my co-religionists, I became embarrassed by these sentiments. Such crude beliefs were unseemly. Sophistication demanded a more nuanced view. Republicans, I now realized, could be decent men and women who were just parroting the country-club line. Even the Reagan Age — that endless period I as a Californian was forced to spend under the Great Communicator’s genially callous thumb, while the Woolly Mammoths died out and Ice Ages came and went across the globe — couldn’t make me return to the wooden Stalinist sloganeering of my youth. I even reevaluated the Carpenters.

And then came the Starr referral and Henry Hyde and the House Judiciary Committee vote, and I realized I had gotten it right the first time.

When the Republicans in the full House vote to remove President Clinton from office, as they will almost certainly do, they will prove that those brain-dead radical stereotypes about them really do apply. They will be revealed as mean-spirited, partisan hacks, hypocrites, moral absolutists hiding their craven desire for vengeance and power beneath a ridiculously transparent fagade of pious “deliberation” and “respect for law.” The GOP will stand exposed before all of America as the party of vicious, petty ideologues who, in their outrageous desire to undo the results of two lawful elections, seized upon a grotesquely acquired legalistic evasion that falls so far short of meeting the constitutional standard of high crimes and misdemeanors as to be laughable.

Or, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, as the ever-generous New York Times did in a recent editorial. Let’s assume that some of them are actually sincere in their belief that lying about sex — in an obvious vendetta case brought by a biased and obsessed “independent” counsel who, after utterly failing to find any serious misdeeds, connived to lay a perjury trap — constitutes an impeachable offense. But if they really believe that, then we must conclude that either their grasp of the Constitution is so weak that their fitness to sit in any elected office is highly questionable, or that they are so rigid in their moral purity as to be Torquemadas in power ties, quasi-theocratic inquisitors who would turn America into a frightening Bible Belt version of 15th century Spain or 20th century Iran.

Why are the Republicans doing this? Why, defying the express wishes of the American people, are they trampling on the Constitution, weakening the presidency and inaugurating a hideous new political world of blood feuds and true hatred? And why are they ignoring the warnings from the business community — to which they used to listen — that impeachment is dangerous and destabilizing?

The answer is simple: This is who they are. This action reflects the GOP’s true nature. This is a party so desperate to burn a president they dislike at the stake that they’ll incinerate the Constitution to get the fire started. All that hoo-hah a few weeks ago about how Robert Livingston was going to bring a new “moderation” to the party now that nutty professor Gingrich was gone stands revealed as empty verbiage. The truth is that this is now a party of zealots and ideologues, obsessed crusaders who have completely lost touch with the common sense, fairness and decency of the American people. Like Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, who declared a purifying “Year Zero” when history’s slate was to be wiped clean (and all nonpeasants were to be killed), these high-minded crusaders want to restore America’s sense of moral purpose — and if they have to trash the country in order to do it, well, extremism in the defense of virtue is no vice! To the tumbrels with the parasites, citizens, while the Times and the Post knit their stern editorials! GOP “moderates”? What moderates? The few “moderates” who are trotted forth on TV to be shown to the mob, like condemned Chinese dissidents with signs hanging around their necks, seem barely sentient.

The façade of “judiciousness” and “bipartisanship” that the pious media, ever cowed by the musty aura of Historic Constitutional Events, dark-wooded chambers, invocations of “our national honor” and other useful fig leafs for skullduggery, tried to sell us has vanished without a trace. Hyde, the Iran-contra apologist and wisecracking GOP attack dog who was elevated to Solomon-like heights of wisdom by the media before the disgraceful House Judicial proceedings began, has now taken up final residence in the trash can with unsavory American byproducts like our anal home-grown Robespierre, Kenneth Starr, and the maniacal Bob Barr, who apparently believes that Clinton should have been impeached at birth. There was Hyde this weekend on the talk shows, saying that Clinton should resign. This paragon of impartiality apparently modeled his jurisprudential approach on the Red Queen in “Alice in Wonderland,” who, as a witness departs in the trial of the Knave of Hearts, says under her voice, “And just take off his head outside.” But, gosh, he sure sounds courtly talking that parliamentary talk.

In fact, Hyde may have been taking those groveling Times setup pieces a little too seriously, for this weekend he began to invoke no less a figure than Jesus Christ. Asked by Cokie Roberts why he advocated impeachment and didn’t think censure should be an option despite popular opinion, he replied, “If Jesus Christ had taken a poll, he would never have preached the gospel.” This is a wonderful addition to the great American tradition of reactionary invocations of Jesus, who after patriotism represents the best refuge for scoundrels. (The all-time winner remains that English-only advocate who declaimed, “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”) With all due respect to the pious motivations behind Chairman Hyde’s religious parallel, however, it may not be a good strategy for him to go there. Somehow, when one looks at the faces of Clinton’s judges — the pig-eyed ex-exterminator Tom DeLay; the robotic, hate-filled Barr; the snidely, vitriolic David Schippers; the priggish choirboy-judge Bill McCollum — the loving face of the Savior does not exactly rush into one’s mind. In fact, these worthies recall somewhat less inspiring figures from the New Testament — namely the Pharisees, those vengeful, legalistic Jews who denounced Jesus. (The “moderates,” who will doubtless be washing their hands avidly in the days to come, conjure up that noted Northeastern GOP fence-sitter, Pontius Pilate.) Admittedly, the mushy-souled escape artist President Clinton makes a truly terrible Jesus, but the imagery still isn’t good.

The Republicans are zealots, but they’re crafty zealots. Their attempt to take Clinton down may blow up in their faces, but they have reasons for thinking it won’t. They think they can get away with this without being punished at the polls, even if they don’t kill Clinton. But they cherish a secret hope that they will kill him — that once impeachment is a fait accompli, with all the previously mentioned flag-waving, invocation of the Founders, gravity of the charges blah blah blah, public opinion will turn against Clinton, leading either to his resignation or to his conviction and removal by the Senate. And that hope is based on their belief that Clinton’s support is inch-deep — that once the American people realize he’s in trouble, they’ll desert him like rats abandoning a sinking ship.

It’s the self-fulfilling prophecy strategy, and it is astonishingly contemptuous. It presumes that the American people have no memory, no spiritual or moral consistency, that they are incapable of holding onto any position any longer than a jittery kid with a remote can watch one TV program. The GOP believes this for several reasons. First, they too are children of our Warholian society of the spectacle, in which everything that flickers across the screen has equal weight and nothing stays on the screen for more than a few seconds. As such, they too have been seduced by the belief that, in Marx’s words, “all that is solid melts into air.” Yesterday’s Clinton supporter is today’s impeachment supporter.

The scary thing is, they just might be right. There have been very few tests of our national consistency in the channel-changing age. The public might be influenced by the media, which has begun running this-is-a-whole-new-ballgame-now stories. The Times, much of whose Clinton coverage continues to appall, splashed on its cover a thin reaction story (ominous headline: “Gravity of the issues sinking in for a public weary of scandal”) that featured two or three people in that multicultural mirror of America, Tarrytown, N.Y., saying they were now leaning toward impeachment. (How odd, considering nothing in this story has changed in months except the vote to impeach.) But it would be bitterly ironic (although perfectly consistent, considering their fealty to the most ephemeral and history-destroying forms of commodity capitalism) if the Republican Party, which at its best represents community and continuity, were to use postmodern public amnesia to flick a president off the screen.

The second reason the Republicans think they may be able to change people’s minds is that their own Pharisaism, their residence on the Gothic side of America’s great cultural divide, makes them incapable of understanding that the American people’s so-what reaction to Clinton’s sexual escapades and subsequent lies about them is not mere empty situational ethics, not a debased version of a ’60s “whatever, man” ethos, but is a coherent and reasonable moral vision. That vision represents the pragmatic spirit of one of our culture’s great achievements, the English common law, whose guiding word is reasonableness. And it also reflects the lessons most of us learn from our parents. You should never lie, our parents teach us when we’re young, and that is an essential lesson. But later they also teach us to understand why people lie, to distinguish between different kinds of lies — and to forgive when forgiveness is called for. We learn that the real world doesn’t entirely correspond to the black-and-white moral universe our parents taught us. In the real world, for example, we learn that politicians make moral compromises — and flat-out lie — all the time. We also learn that august politicians, and even men with the word “judge” before their name, can be hatchet men. That doesn’t mean we don’t strive to do the right thing, or expect that our leaders do the same, but that we realize that sometimes it isn’t clear what that is. And we learn that often the people who are the most certain what the right thing is, the people with the answer, the really moral people, are the most dangerous of all.

Because the moralists who have hijacked the Republican Party don’t understand that the American people’s morality, as evidenced in its reaction to Clinton, is deeply rooted and coherent, they think it’s shallow, a mere cover for selfishness or laziness. They believe that once America grasps that high moral “outrage,” to use William Bennett’s word, is called for, it will condemn Clinton and reach new ethical heights. We must again, we hear over and over, become a country of laws, not of men. They ignore the fact that no one wants Clinton to be above the law — people just don’t want him to be below the law, to be prosecuted for things no one else would ever be prosecuted for. And they conveniently forget the fact that Clinton has been prosecuted for four years not by “the laws” but by a highly flawed man.

In this vicious partisan climate, in which appeals to high moral purpose cloak the intent to commit political assassination, the incessant demands by the New York Times’ editorial page that Clinton admit he lied under oath — say “those missing magic words,” in the words of the headline of Monday’s leader — are positively bizarre. Demanding that Clinton fall to his knees in an act of national self-abnegation that might sway those fabled “moderates,” the Times insists that the most important issue facing the nation is not the unprecedented and stunningly irresponsible action taken by the House Judiciary Committee, not the likelihood that the GOP rank and file will follow its jackbooted leaders and shut the country down, but whether or not Clinton says “uncle.” This is ridiculous. There’s no reason to suppose that the rabid GOP dogs who have been calling for Clinton’s head all along would suddenly become docile, censure-amenable laphounds if he admitted to perjury. There’s a lot more reason to assume that the long knives would come out in earnest, whether now or after Clinton left office. (Republicans who are now saying they won’t consider censure unless Clinton admits he lied are using the issue to hide: They know he can’t admit that for legal reasons, but it gives them an excuse to vote for impeachment.) Clinton has set the world record for public humiliation, but apparently that is not enough for the Times. Out of some inexplicably punitive and moralistic impulse, it pays less rhetorical attention to the appallingly partisan Judiciary Committee proceedings (which it criticizes almost in passing) than to whether Clinton has groveled low enough.

Maybe the go-for-the-jugular Republican strategy will work, and the American public will be won over to impeachment. But it probably won’t. And there is reason to think that the day of the impeachment vote — most likely Dec. 17 — will be a day that will live in GOP infamy — that it will be remembered as the day that the party lost its moral standing, became a marginal home for dogmatists and cranks and cynical political opportunists willing to ignore the wishes of the majority to satisfy the ravings of true believers. The Republicans thought they could get away with spitting in the face of the American people, but they may be spitting against the wind.

Later, like many of my co-religionists, I became embarrassed by these sentiments. Such crude beliefs were unseemly. Sophistication demanded a more nuanced view. Republicans, I now realized, could be decent men and women who were just parroting the country-club line. Even the Reagan Age — that endless period I as a Californian was forced to spend under the Great Communicator’s genially callous thumb, while the Woolly Mammoths died out and Ice Ages came and went across the globe — couldn’t make me return to the wooden Stalinist sloganeering of my youth. I even reevaluated the Carpenters.

And then came the Starr referral and Henry Hyde and the House Judiciary Committee vote, and I realized I had gotten it right the first time.

When the Republicans in the full House vote to remove President Clinton from office, as they will almost certainly do, they will prove that those brain-dead radical stereotypes about them really do apply. They will be revealed as mean-spirited, partisan hacks, hypocrites, moral absolutists hiding their craven desire for vengeance and power beneath a ridiculously transparent façade of pious “deliberation” and “respect for law.” The GOP will stand exposed before all of America as the party of vicious, petty ideologues who, in their outrageous desire to undo the results of two lawful elections, seized upon a grotesquely acquired legalistic evasion that falls so far short of meeting the constitutional standard of high crimes and misdemeanors as to be laughable.

Or, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, as the ever-generous New York Times did in a recent editorial. Let’s assume that some of them are actually sincere in their belief that lying about sex — in an obvious vendetta case brought by a biased and obsessed “independent” counsel who, after utterly failing to find any serious misdeeds, connived to lay a perjury trap — constitutes an impeachable offense. But if they really believe that, then we must conclude that either their grasp of the Constitution is so weak that their fitness to sit in any elected office is highly questionable, or that they are so rigid in their moral purity as to be Torquemadas in power ties, quasi-theocratic inquisitors who would turn America into a frightening Bible Belt version of 15th century Spain or 20th century Iran.

Why are the Republicans doing this? Why, defying the express wishes of the American people, are they trampling on the Constitution, weakening the presidency and inaugurating a hideous new political world of blood feuds and true hatred? And why are they ignoring the warnings from the business community — to which they used to listen — that impeachment is dangerous and destabilizing?

The answer is simple: This is who they are. This action reflects the GOP’s true nature. This is a party so desperate to burn a president they dislike at the stake that they’ll incinerate the Constitution to get the fire started. All that hoo-hah a few weeks ago about how Robert Livingston was going to bring a new “moderation” to the party now that nutty professor Gingrich was gone stands revealed as empty verbiage. The truth is that this is now a party of zealots and ideologues, obsessed crusaders who have completely lost touch with the common sense, fairness and decency of the American people. Like Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, who declared a purifying “Year Zero” when history’s slate was to be wiped clean (and all nonpeasants were to be killed), these high-minded crusaders want to restore America’s sense of moral purpose — and if they have to trash the country in order to do it, well, extremism in the defense of virtue is no vice! To the tumbrels with the parasites, citizens, while the Times and the Post knit their stern editorials! GOP “moderates”? What moderates? The few “moderates” who are trotted forth on TV to be shown to the mob, like condemned Chinese dissidents with signs hanging around their necks, seem barely sentient.

- – - – - – - – - -

The façade of “judiciousness” and “bipartisanship” that the pious media, ever cowed by the musty aura of Historic Constitutional Events, dark-wooded chambers, invocations of “our national honor” and other useful fig leafs for skullduggery, tried to sell us has vanished without a trace. Hyde, the Iran-contra apologist and wisecracking GOP attack dog who was elevated to Solomon-like heights of wisdom by the media before the disgraceful House Judicial proceedings began, has now taken up final residence in the trash can with unsavory American byproducts like our anal home-grown Robespierre, Kenneth Starr, and the maniacal Bob Barr, who apparently believes that Clinton should have been impeached at birth. There was Hyde this weekend on the talk shows, saying that Clinton should resign. This paragon of impartiality apparently modeled his jurisprudential approach on the Red Queen in “Alice in Wonderland,” who, as a witness departs in the trial of the Knave of Hearts, says under her voice, “And just take off his head outside.” But, gosh, he sure sounds courtly talking that parliamentary talk.

In fact, Hyde may have been taking those groveling Times setup pieces a little too seriously, for this weekend he began to invoke no less a figure than Jesus Christ. Asked by Cokie Roberts why he advocated impeachment and didn’t think censure should be an option despite popular opinion, he replied, “If Jesus Christ had taken a poll, he would never have preached the gospel.” This is a wonderful addition to the great American tradition of reactionary invocations of Jesus, who after patriotism represents the best refuge for scoundrels. (The all-time winner remains that English-only advocate who declaimed, “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”) With all due respect to the pious motivations behind Chairman Hyde’s religious parallel, however, it may not be a good strategy for him to go there. Somehow, when one looks at the faces of Clinton’s judges — the pig-eyed ex-exterminator Tom DeLay; the robotic, hate-filled Barr; the snidely, vitriolic David Schippers; the priggish choirboy-judge Bill McCollum — the loving face of the Savior does not exactly rush into one’s mind. In fact, these worthies recall somewhat less inspiring figures from the New Testament — namely the Pharisees, those vengeful, legalistic Jews who denounced Jesus. (The “moderates,” who will doubtless be washing their hands avidly in the days to come, conjure up that noted Northeastern GOP fence-sitter, Pontius Pilate.) Admittedly, the mushy-souled escape artist President Clinton makes a truly terrible Jesus, but the imagery still isn’t good.

The Republicans are zealots, but they’re crafty zealots. Their attempt to take Clinton down may blow up in their faces, but they have reasons for thinking it won’t. They think they can get away with this without being punished at the polls, even if they don’t kill Clinton. But they cherish a secret hope that they will kill him — that once impeachment is a fait accompli, with all the previously mentioned flag-waving, invocation of the Founders, gravity of the charges blah blah blah, public opinion will turn against Clinton, leading either to his resignation or to his conviction and removal by the Senate. And that hope is based on their belief that Clinton’s support is inch-deep — that once the American people realize he’s in trouble, they’ll desert him like rats abandoning a sinking ship.

It’s the self-fulfilling prophecy strategy, and it is astonishingly contemptuous. It presumes that the American people have no memory, no spiritual or moral consistency, that they are incapable of holding onto any position any longer than a jittery kid with a remote can watch one TV program. The GOP believes this for several reasons. First, they too are children of our Warholian society of the spectacle, in which everything that flickers across the screen has equal weight and nothing stays on the screen for more than a few seconds. As such, they too have been seduced by the belief that, in Marx’s words, “all that is solid melts into air.” Yesterday’s Clinton supporter is today’s impeachment supporter.

The scary thing is, they just might be right. There have been very few tests of our national consistency in the channel-changing age. The public might be influenced by the media, which has begun running this-is-a-whole-new-ballgame-now stories. The Times, much of whose Clinton coverage continues to appall, splashed on its cover a thin reaction story (ominous headline: “Gravity of the issues sinking in for a public weary of scandal”) that featured two or three people in that multicultural mirror of America, Tarrytown, N.Y., saying they were now leaning toward impeachment. (How odd, considering nothing in this story has changed in months except the vote to impeach.) But it would be bitterly ironic (although perfectly consistent, considering their fealty to the most ephemeral and history-destroying forms of commodity capitalism) if the Republican Party, which at its best represents community and continuity, were to use postmodern public amnesia to flick a president off the screen.

The second reason the Republicans think they may be able to change people’s minds is that their own Pharisaism, their residence on the Gothic side of America’s great cultural divide, makes them incapable of understanding that the American people’s so-what reaction to Clinton’s sexual escapades and subsequent lies about them is not mere empty situational ethics, not a debased version of a ’60s “whatever, man” ethos, but is a coherent and reasonable moral vision. That vision represents the pragmatic spirit of one of our culture’s great achievements, the English common law, whose guiding word is reasonableness. And it also reflects the lessons most of us learn from our parents. You should never lie, our parents teach us when we’re young, and that is an essential lesson. But later they also teach us to understand why people lie, to distinguish between different kinds of lies — and to forgive when forgiveness is called for. We learn that the real world doesn’t entirely correspond to the black-and-white moral universe our parents taught us. In the real world, for example, we learn that politicians make moral compromises — and flat-out lie — all the time. We also learn that august politicians, and even men with the word “judge” before their name, can be hatchet men. That doesn’t mean we don’t strive to do the right thing, or expect that our leaders do the same, but that we realize that sometimes it isn’t clear what that is. And we learn that often the people who are the most certain what the right thing is, the people with the answer, the really moral people, are the most dangerous of all.

Because the moralists who have hijacked the Republican Party don’t understand that the American people’s morality, as evidenced in its reaction to Clinton, is deeply rooted and coherent, they think it’s shallow, a mere cover for selfishness or laziness. They believe that once America grasps that high moral “outrage,” to use William Bennett’s word, is called for, it will condemn Clinton and reach new ethical heights. We must again, we hear over and over, become a country of laws, not of men. They ignore the fact that no one wants Clinton to be above the law — people just don’t want him to be below the law, to be prosecuted for things no one else would ever be prosecuted for. And they conveniently forget the fact that Clinton has been prosecuted for four years not by “the laws” but by a highly flawed man.

In this vicious partisan climate, in which appeals to high moral purpose cloak the intent to commit political assassination, the incessant demands by the New York Times’ editorial page that Clinton admit he lied under oath — say “those missing magic words,” in the words of the headline of Monday’s leader — are positively bizarre. Demanding that Clinton fall to his knees in an act of national self-abnegation that might sway those fabled “moderates,” the Times insists that the most important issue facing the nation is not the unprecedented and stunningly irresponsible action taken by the House Judiciary Committee, not the likelihood that the GOP rank and file will follow its jackbooted leaders and shut the country down, but whether or not Clinton says “uncle.” This is ridiculous. There’s no reason to suppose that the rabid GOP dogs who have been calling for Clinton’s head all along would suddenly become docile, censure-amenable laphounds if he admitted to perjury. There’s a lot more reason to assume that the long knives would come out in earnest, whether now or after Clinton left office. (Republicans who are now saying they won’t consider censure unless Clinton admits he lied are using the issue to hide: They know he can’t admit that for legal reasons, but it gives them an excuse to vote for impeachment.) Clinton has set the world record for public humiliation, but apparently that is not enough for the Times. Out of some inexplicably punitive and moralistic impulse, it pays less rhetorical attention to the appallingly partisan Judiciary Committee proceedings (which it criticizes almost in passing) than to whether Clinton has groveled low enough.

Maybe the go-for-the-jugular Republican strategy will work, and the American public will be won over to impeachment. But it probably won’t. And there is reason to think that the day of the impeachment vote — most likely Dec. 17 — will be a day that will live in GOP infamy — that it will be remembered as the day that the party lost its moral standing, became a marginal home for dogmatists and cranks and cynical political opportunists willing to ignore the wishes of the majority to satisfy the ravings of true believers. The Republicans thought they could get away with spitting in the face of the American people, but they may be spitting against the wind.