Please do try to remember the purpose of this list serv! I subscribe here
to stay current with developments in Virginia history--if this serv becomes
simply another forum for exchange of political opinion (one way or the
other) it loses much of its value to me. This particular post has at best
only a tangential relationship to Virginia history. I don't wish to imply
that the views discussed below are incorrect, or wrong, or objectionable in
and of themselves--but surely there are other more suitable places to
discuss them.
--On Wednesday, March 27, 2002 7:51 AM -0500 Constantine Gutzman
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
>
> To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
> at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
--
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of History, MSC 2001
James Madison University
Harrisonburg VA 22807
Phone: 540/568-6306
Email: [log in to unmask]
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