Life After Impeachment.

For the last year, political debate in Washington has been an endless series of reruns. Impeaching the President is the name of the show. To watch it, you'd think the range of political opinion stretches from those who think Congress should impeach the President for lying about a sordid sexual affair to those who would stand by Clinton no matter what he does. If you're not for Clinton, you must be for impeachment, and if you're not for impeachment, you must be for Clinton.

Here at The Progressive, we're neither. We have vocally opposed Bill Clinton since his first election campaign. We also think the Ken Starr investigation and the impeachment process have been a ridiculous farce. But then this magazine is published in that vast and mysterious expanse of the American continent beyond the Beltway, and out here most of the American public got fed up with both the White House and the impeachment process long ago. To the Washington political establishment's consternation, most of us do not agree with members of the House and Senate, whose insufferable speeches on impeachment drone on, that this is the trial of the century. The pundits and politicians in Washington know about public opinion, because they read the polls. But they don't really understand it, since they continue to discuss and analyze the problem only with their peers in Washington, D.C., whose appetite for the sex scandal and the impeachment debate appears to be bottomless.

Our position is simple: Clinton has been a terrible President, not because of his sexual compulsions, but because of his willingness to sacrifice any principle and turn on any friend for the sake of his own political ambition. Clinton is the architect of the New Democrat ideal. He insisted that the Democratic Party abandon its traditional, embarrassingly down-at-the-heels constituencies: the poor and afflicted, single mothers on welfare, rank-and-file unionists who are losing their jobs because of global trade deals, anti-war activists, and civil libertarians.

We're not about to stick up for Clinton. But we can't endorse the idea that he should be removed from office for lying about an affair in the course of an investigation designed to bring him down at any cost. Independent counsel Ken Starr was so determined to pin something on the President that he finally nailed him for crimes that took place within the context of the Starr investigation itself. The articles of impeachment voted out of the House of Representatives don't include any of the items Starr was originally appointed, years ago, to investigate. They don't even include the President's civil perjury in the Paula Jones case on the subject of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Instead, the President is impeached for lying about his sexual dalliance with Lewinsky to Starr's investigators in front of the grand jury, and for obstructing justice--though evidence for this charge is hardly conclusive. The investigation began as a roving hunt for wrongdoing of any sort, and ended as a sting operation to catch the President in a tawdry affair that had nothing to do with matters of state.

Along the way, Starr badgered, threatened, and strong-armed a series of witnesses, many of whom ran up crushing legal bills and had their lives turned upside down for no good reason.

In spite of the gross abuses of the Starr investigation, we continue to believe that there ought to be an independent counsel--beholden neither to the President nor to his political enemies--to investigate high-level Administration officials.

Many of Starr's prosecutorial abuses are not unique to the independent counsel's office. "The Starr investigation made public the enormous power prosecutors have over witnesses before grand juries," says Alan Morrison, an attorney with the Public Citizen litigation group. "Some important people were very badly treated before the grand jury. That may be the hidden blessing in all of this: It exposes problems with the grand jury system, and now there's a movement to fix that."

Morrison, who helped draft the independent counsel statute in 1973, says the future of the law is unclear: "I have no idea as to whether the whole thing is going to be scotched, or if it will be modified in some way. The only thing that is clear is that it won't be reenacted as it is," he says. "No one in Congress knows who will be in the White House in two years, so no one knows which side they want to be on."

The question is how to have a truly independent counsel, who does not become the instrument of a particular party.

"You'll never be able to totally depoliticize the process," says Morrison. "One thing you could do, though, is to forbid anyone who has held elected office within the last five years to serve. That would have made Judge Starr ineligible."

Another suggestion Morrison makes is that the independent counsel be someone with substantial criminal prosecutorial background. That also would have eliminated Starr.

Certainly, the independent counsel should not represent tobacco interests, as Starr did, or other clients involved in pending legal action against the federal government. Nor should partisans of the opposing party be allowed to select the independent counsel. The panel of judges that selects the independent counsel should be balanced between the two parties (unlike the panel of conservative Republicans that selected Starr), Morrison suggests. He also recommends that they choose from a preselected pool of qualified independent prosecutors who have been screened in advance.

Finally, there's the problem of the fishing expedition. "Every time a new matter came up with Bill or Hillary's name on it, the Attorney General referred it to Starr," says Morrison. "A lot of those things--File-gate, Travelgate, even the Monica Lewinsky case--probably didn't merit that. The Monica investigation was bizarre; no crime was committed [when Starr first began looking into the affair]. The witnesses were not exactly the most reliable witnesses. There ought to be the same threshold of evidence for any new area of investigation that there was for the original investigation. And unless a new matter arises out of the same basic conduct as the first matter, it should go to a different prosecutor."

What are the lessons of impeachment for progressives? Some leftwing Democrats in Congress have made it their job to defend the President during the admittedly appalling investigation and Congressional debate. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Charles Rangel, Democrat of New York, John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, and Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, who found it nearly impossible to get a few minutes with the President before the impeachment circus came to town, have been speaking up for him on the Judiciary Committee, on the floor of the House, and on the Sunday morning talk shows. Pro-labor Democrats who opposed Clinton's NAFTA deal and fast-track trade authority, including Richard Gephardt, Democrat of Missouri, have been giving speeches on the White House lawn, defending the President against Ken Starr and the Republicans. Gephardt and David Bonior, Democrat of Michigan, both opposed the Persian Gulf War, yet they intervened to support the President's bombing of Iraq on the eve of his impeachment, and to declare that going forward with the impeachment vote would compromise U.S. national security. Liberal Democrats abandoned principle to support Clinton. They should have known better.

After the whole sorry affair is over, what will the left get for its pains? Will the President or his heir apparent Al Gore now champion the rights of the poor, restore welfare, propose a radical overhaul of the nation's health-care system to protect the uninsured, defend the civil liberties of people deprived of their rights under his own immigration and crime bills? Don't hold your breath.

Clinton has been a lousy President on almost every issue that matters to progressives except abortion rights. Take civil liberties. As columnist Nat Hentoff points out in a column in The Washington Post, Clinton is "a serial violator of the Bill of Rights, among other parts of the Constitution." Hentoff decries Clinton's attack on the Fourth Amendment, an attack that includes signing a law authorizing roving wiretaps. For the first time, thanks to Clinton, the FBI has the power to bug any phone a suspect may use, including the phones in private residences of that person's friends, neighbors, or associates. The FBI can even listen in on conversations when the suspect is not involved. Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover could only dream about the kind of electronic surveillance of citizens the Clinton Administration has institutionalized. Clinton has also been the worst President in recent history for the rights of the accused and habeas corpus. His 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act limited appeals for prisoners on death row and speeded up executions for people whose time clock ran out before their appellate attorneys had a chance to go to court. Under the same law, Clinton proudly authorized summary deportations of immigrants accused of consorting with terrorists, without due process.

As Patrick Caddell and Marc Cooper pointed out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled "The Death of Liberal Outrage," Clinton supporters have "sheared off their principles in order to squeeze into that little black box that is Clinton's moral universe." For example, liberals like to forget that Clinton began his first Presidential campaign by proudly campaigning on his support for the death penalty. He returned home to Arkansas during the 1992 campaign to execute a retarded man, to make the point that he was tough. "But the most disturbing consequence of the surrender to Clinton has been the self-strangulation of the Democratic peace constituency," Caddell and Cooper write. "The low point came when Representative Patrick Kennedy, Democrat of Rhode Island, resurrected--nearly word for word--the scurrilous language the LBJ White House used in 1966 when it questioned the patriotism of his uncle, Robert F. Kennedy, who had begun to speak out against the Vietnam War. "Representative Kennedy even suggested that Congress should ask the CIA for permission to go ahead with the impeachment debate."

If there is a bright side to the impeachment, it may be that progressives, especially those outside Washington, will finally give up on Bill Clinton and the program of moral bankruptcy he has imposed on his party. The Democratic Party's natural constituents--the poor, women, workers, African Americans. Latinos, gays and lesbians, people who care about the environment, who want a just and compassionate society, who recognize that their interests are not the same as those of large corporations--need better leadership. Down with Clintonism. It's time for a real progressive politics to take its place.