Guest Essayist: The Honorable James E. Rogan, Judge of the Superior Court of California
Article 1, Section 3, Clause 6-7
6. The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.
7. Judgment in Cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.
During President Bill Clinton’s administration, he became a defendant in a sexual harassment civil rights lawsuit filed against him by a subordinate state employee from his days as Arkansas governor. At the case proceeded toward trial, Clinton tried to conceal from the court a recent affair with another young subordinate employee. When the federal judge in the lawsuit ordered Clinton to answer questions about such relationships, Clinton denied the affair under oath. Thus, the president committed felony perjury, and later obstructed justice, to avoid paying damages to the plaintiff in the lawsuit, as well as to duck the embarrassment and political damage of disclosure. After a special prosecutor investigated and delivered an evidentiary report to Congress on Clinton’s deceit, the House impeached Clinton, thereby triggering the constitutional obligation of an impeachment trial under Article 1, Section 3, Clauses 6 and 7. In 1998-1999, I became intimately familiar with this obligation: I was one of the prosecutors in Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial. Here are three brief thoughts about the experience:
First, the Constitution solemnly required Clinton, as a condition of becoming president, to swear an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution,” and to take care that he executed our laws faithfully. That obligation included defending laws that protect women in the workplace, just as it also required protecting our legal system from perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power. Fidelity to the presidential oath is not dependent on any president’s personal threshold of comfort or embarrassment.
Second, during Clinton’s impeachment, we came under attack from many who accused us of using impeachment to unconstitutionally seek to “undo an election.” Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn debunked this notion eloquently:
[E]lections have no higher standing under our Constitution than the impeachment process. Both stem from provisions of the Constitution. The people elect a president to do a constitutional job. They act under the Constitution when they do it. At the same time, they elect a Congress to do a different constitutional job…. If the President is guilty of acts justifying impeachment, then he, not the Congress, will have overturned the election. He will have acted in ways that betray the purpose of his election. He will have acted not as a constitutional representative, but as a monarch, subversive of, or above, the law. If the great powers given the president are abused, then to impeach him defends not only the results of elections, but that higher thing which elections are in service, namely, the preeminence of the Constitution[.]
Finally, I didn’t vote to impeach Clinton or prosecute him in an effort to police his personal life. Whether he had one affair or a thousand of them was of no moment to me. (Besides, as an ex-bartender from Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, I’m hardly a stranger to temptation myself). However, I did care deeply about the precedent his conduct set for future chief executives who might later commit the same felonies for reasons weightier than testosterone.
Why is this notion of precedent so important?
When the Founders wrote impeachment into the Constitution as the remedy against those who commit “high crimes and misdemeanors,” they never defined that phrase. The definition comes from precedent, i.e., the previous House of Representatives impeachments. Whenever the House decides certain conduct is (or is not) impeachable, that becomes the precedent, or the standard, for future impeachments. Had the House failed to impeach Clinton just because of the tawdry subject matter underlying his crimes, any future president committing perjury or obstructing justice with far more destructive motives could point to the Clinton Precedent and claim his conduct was not impeachable.
The polls showed that most Americans at the time hated Clinton’s impeachment, and also hated those of us involved in it. As a result of impeachment, my opponent in the next congressional election defeated me handily. Despite the loss, I take comfort in knowing that because we impeached Clinton, Americans today live in a country where every future president is on notice that perjury and obstruction of justice is a one-way White House eviction notice—as long as a future members of Congress have the spine to stand up to him.
James E. Rogan is a Judge of the Superior Court of California. He is a former Member of Congress who served as a House Manager in the impeachment trial of President Clinton. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Catching Our Flag: Behind the Scenes of a Presidential Impeachment,” published by World Net Daily Books and scheduled for release on May 3, 2011.
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