Malinda Jones writes, "Clinton did not commit any high crimes or
misdemeanors in office,
regardless of the rabid efforts of his political opponents to tar him with
their own sins."  I am not sure which of President Clinton's opponents she
believes had committed obstruction of justice, witness tampering, perjury,
subornation of perjury, etc.  Jones' appraisal comes at the end of a
sequence of events that led one senator (West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd)
to muse that while President Clinton had committed crimes, he could not be
removed from office by the Senate for them, and one federal judge (a Clinton
apppointee to the bench) to decide that the president had to pay a
high-five-digit fine for ... well, what evidently now pass in the Senate for
unimpeachable offenses.  President Clinton also agreed, on his last day in
office, to surrender his law license for five years as part of a plea
bargain with the Office of Special Counsel.

List members who would like a fuller background to these developments may
wish to consult two notable texts on impeachment published long before
"l'affaire Clinton":  Hoffer and Hull, _Impeachment in America, 1635-1805_;
and Berger, _Impeachment:  The Constitutional Problems_.  Among other
things, reading these two books will prepare one to make a well-grounded
judgement on the issue what "high crimes and misdemeanors" means -- and
thus, to decide whether President Clinton (or President Bush I, President
Reagan, President L. Johnson, President F. Roosevelt...) committed any.  The
testimony before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary in the Clinton matter
on this issue generally drew from these two books -- Democrats and Clinton
defenders from Hoffer and Hull, Republicans and Clinton opponents from
Berger; Hoffer himself and Stephen Presser (Berger Professor at Northwestern
Law and a proponent of Berger's argument, besides a witness for the
prosecution in the Senate) later had a spirited exchange on H-LAW, which one
can review in the H-LAW archive on the H-NET web site.  Besides those two
books, there now are several collections of impeachment-related material
drawn from the period since the U.S. Constitution was ratified, and van
Tassel, et al., _Impeachable Offenses:  A Documentary History From 1787 to
the Present_ is as good as any.  (VA-HIST's own Paul Finkelman is among its
editors.)

I think that the reason Mr. Bartley referred to "post-Clinton standards"
instead of using one of Jones' preferred formulations such as "post-Nixon
standards" is that in the Nixon era, the president's office-holding
contemporaries judged him deserving of impeachment, while President
Clinton's office-holding contemporaries did not reach a similar judgement
regarding him.  Bartley seems to believe both men deserved that sanction,
and he concludes that a change in the public explains the difference between
the fates the two met.
Constantine Gutzman

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