[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 139 (Wednesday, October 7, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H10008-H10009]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A DEMOCRAT

  (Mr. KINGSTON asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks and include therein 
extraneous material.)
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, not wanting to respond directly to my 
friend, the gentlewoman from Georgia (Ms. McKinney), I must say 
apparently she has not read the bill. There is nothing in the bill that 
talks about a land swap. I would invite my friend to read the bill. But 
then again, that might be asking too much of a Democrat. But that is 
not in the bill.
  I do want to say this, Mr. Speaker, in terms of ``What It Means to Be 
a Democrat'', the article that was in the Washington Post by Michael 
Kelly. He talked to the Committee on the Judiciary the other day about 
that crimes, even if they had been committed, did not matter. He said 
what mattered were statements, whether truthful or not, but what was 
their context.
  What the author Michael Kelly talked about is this is where the 
Democrat party has now come to, that it does not matter if you lie or 
tell the truth, it just mattered what the contexts are.
  Is that what the new Democrat values are? They can talk about a bill 
that does not even have legislation in it and speak against the bill, 
but truth does not matter as long as you are a Democrat. The context is 
what matters. I think it is very important for my colleagues to know 
what the Democrat party, it seems, has fallen to.
  The article referred to is as follows:

                [From the Washington Post, Oct. 7, 1998]

                     What It Means To Be a Democrat

                           (By Michael Kelly)

       Defining moments in politics sometimes arrive with fanfare 
     and glory and purpose: ``I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a 
     New Deal for the American people.'' And sometimes they slip 
     in unplanned and unannounced, and mostly unnoticed--moments 
     where something is defined not by intent but by default.
       The defining moment for what it means to be a Democrat now, 
     in the time of Clinton, sidled quietly on-stage this week, on 
     the afternoon of the day when all 16 Democratic members of 
     the House Judiciary Committee, in dereliction of their 
     constitutional duty, voted to block an inquiry into whether a 
     president who is of their party had committed impeachable 
     offenses.
       David P. Schippers, the chief investigative counsel for the 
     Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee, had concluded his 
     official report to the committee with a careful finding that 
     ``there exists substantial and credible evidence of 15 
     separate events directly involving President William 
     Jefferson Clinton that . . . may constitute grounds to 
     proceed with an impeachment inquiry.'' Schippers then spoke 
     briefly not as a counsel but as ``a citizen of the United 
     States who happens to be a father and a grandfather.'' He 
     paraphrased the line given Sir Thomas More in the play ``A 
     Man For All Seasons'': ``The laws of this country are the 
     great barriers that protect the citizens from the winds of 
     evil and tyranny. If we permit one of those laws to fall, who 
     will be able to stand in the winds that follow?''
       This was a Democrat speaking. But Schippers, who ran 
     Attorney General Robert Kennedy's organized crime task force 
     in Chicago, is a Democrat from another time. Every word that 
     Schippers spoke, in his grave and sober and serious report, 
     rested not on the values of any vast right-wing conspiracy, 
     but on what were once the values of a vast (and now almost 
     vanished) Democratic liberalism, a liberalism that knew that 
     it was the office that was sacred, not the man; that it was 
     the law that ruled, not the ruler.
       That was then, this is now. When Schippers spoke for the 
     sacred law and for the old values, what was the reaction of 
     the Democrats who sat listening to him in that committee 
     room? They rushed to the chairman to complain that such talk 
     was out of order. And Henry Hyde was happy to concede the 
     point; if the Democrats wished to declare themselves opposed 
     to even oratorical support for the rule of law--why, that 
     would be fine with the Republicans. Hyde ordered Schippers' 
     remarks stricken from the record, and the moment was 
     complete.
       So it went. Speaking for the old values, Schippers declared 
     that it must matter if the president had broken the law 
     because he was ``the chief law enforcement officer of the 
     United States,'' a man who had taken an oath to ``preserve, 
     protect and defend'' the law and whose minions wielded the 
     law against the rest of us citizens. Acts of perjury and 
     obstruction of justice--for any reason, in any case--
     perpetuated by the man who controlled the forces of the law, 
     Schippers said, would constitute ``deliberate and direct 
     assaults . . . upon the justice system of the United States 
     and upon the judicial branch of our government.'' The chief 
     law enforcement officer of the United States must not be 
     allowed to lie under oath with impunity, he said, for ``the 
     principle that every witness in every case must tell the 
     truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is the 
     foundation of the American system of justice.''
       Abbe Lowell, the chief investigative counsel for the 
     Democrats on the committee, argued the case for the party's 
     new values. The new values are: Law, schmaw. As Lowell 
     explained, even if the president had lied under oath, even if 
     he had obstructed justice, even if he had committed crimes--
     it did not matter.
       One hears, said Lowell, airily, much talk of ``a largely 
     rhetorical question: `Are you saying that lying under oath or 
     obstruction of justice is not an impeachable offense?' '' 
     That question, he sniffed, may be suitable for ``classroom 
     debate,'' but it was not a fit subject for Congress to 
     consider. A proper inquiry, Lowell explained, should not 
     focus on whether Clinton's ``statements were or were not 
     truthful, but what were their context, what were their 
     impact, and what were their subject matter.''
       This is where the party of Franklin Roosevelt wishes to 
     stand? On the ground that it is permissible--under certain 
     circumstances, you see--for a president to lie under oath, to 
     obstruct justice, to break the law? To stand

[[Page H10009]]

     for this is to stand for ``nothing but an appetite,'' to 
     borrow Jesse Jackson's description of what lurked in the core 
     of Clinton's soul. A party that stands for that must fall.

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