Twenty-five years ago today, the House of Representatives impeached President Bill Clinton. It was the first presidential impeachment in 130 years, and it ushered in a quarter-century of toxic politics.
I still believe what I wrote then: Clinton definitely merited impeachment, but House Republicans badly hurt themselves and the country with how they went about impeaching him. They made the same mistake Republicans are making now against President Joe Biden, which is that they come across as if sating a vicious bloodlust rather than soberly and sorrowfully doing an unwanted but necessary duty.
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It was the appearance of bloodlust that led to the poor House race results in 1998 that cost Newt Gingrich his job as speaker. Even before that, it was the appearance of Republican bloodlust that turned off the vast middle of the electorate. Polls originally showed that if accusations about Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky proved true and he committed perjury about it, Clinton should leave office; but within months, two-thirds of the public were unwilling to say perjury should end his presidency.
“I will never again, as long as I am speaker, make a speech without commenting on this topic,” Gingrich said in April of that year. Well, the public wanted its lawmakers to focus on their needs, not to mono-focus obsessively on a politicized takedown.
Today, there is technically enough evidence to open an impeachment inquiry into Biden but far from enough to assume that the House actually should impeach. That’s what investigations are for: to take reasonably founded suspicions backed by already known facts and, with an open mind, to see if additional facts merit punishment. Yet not a single prominent member of the GOP House majority has made that distinction clearly, nor has anybody clearly explained how an impeachment of Biden would actually serve the public weal in 2024.
Impeachment and removal is an extraordinary remedy. That doesn’t mean impeachment is never appropriate — indeed, count me among those who haven’t shied away from advocating it — but impeachment should never be a goal. The goal should be even-handed justice and service to the Constitution.
Impeachment and removal is a blunt tool. It causes major scars to the body politic, and it can poison the political bloodstream. The scars from the Clinton impeachment were disfiguring. Most of the poison hurt Republicans more than Democrats.
Republicans lost one brilliant-but-mercurial speaker, a visionary. They lost a superbly equipped speaker-designee, Bob Livingston, who could have put the House back on an even keel after Gingrich’s drama. They lost almost all political ability to keep federal spending in check. They lost their ethical compass and suffered the speakership of a party hack named Dennis Hastert, who, it turned out, was also a serious sex offender. And they gave Democrats the last psychological excuse they needed to further poison politics with unprecedented affronts such as smear-filled filibusters of judicial nominees.
Republicans have good reason to investigate the Bidens. Yet unless they find firm proof of dangerous perfidy Biden committed while president, the better approach is to conduct the investigation without fanfare or exaggeration and to establish their own fairness by taking pains to acknowledge any mitigating factors that make Biden look less bad. Eventually, they should issue a thorough, fair-minded report that lays out the case against him for the voters to decide.
In sum, stop playing politics as usual while pandering to an angry base. Instead, act like statesmen, with dignity, serving a nation 333 million strong. Then, trust the voters among the 333 million to recognize, from the facts, that Biden is unfit for another term.