[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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