[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 142 (Saturday, October 10, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2046-E2047]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   AUTHORIZING THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY TO INVESTIGATE WHETHER 
   SUFFICIENT GROUNDS EXIST FOR THE IMPEACHMENT OF WILLIAM JEFFERSON 
                CLINTON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                         HON. JOHN CONYERS, JR.

                              of michigan

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, October 8, 1998

  Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I am inserting into the Record two 
insightful and useful editorials from The Nation magazine. The first 
one, titled ``Clinton, Starr and the Constitution'' points out that 
``this inquiry has been driven by politics from the start.'' The 
Nation, which has been a strident critic of Bill Clinton almost from 
the beginning of his Presidency, states that ``Kenneth Starr's 
impeachment report represents an assault not merely on Bill Clinton 
but, more significant, on the presidency, the Constitution and our 
democracy.''
  It also rightly points our that ``What the conservatives could not 
stop by election they have thwarted by investigation. This Congress saw 
no important legislation passed on tobacco and children, education, 
childcare, minimum wage or campaign finance reform.''
  The second editorial points out that the tactics of this 
investigation have amounted to ``sexual McCarthyism.'' In drawing a 
powerful historical analogy, the Nation points suggest that ``the Enemy 
Other is sexual rather than political deviance.'' Just like during the 
1950's, there have been secret grand jury leaks, wiretapping has been 
used to entrap witnesses and the legal process is being used to punish 
or defame people for activities that may be ``politically and 
culturally anathema,'' but not necessarily crimes. Hence the need for 
the public to hear all the salacious details contained in the Ken Starr 
report.
  I bring these fine editorials to the attention of my colleagues and 
the public.

                    [From The Nation, Oct. 5, 1998]

                  Clinton, Starr and the Constitution

       Kenneth Starr's impeachment report represents an assault 
     not merely on Bill Clinton but, more significant, on the 
     presidency, the Constitution and our democracy. It is crucial 
     to the future of all three that it be repudiated before its 
     damage becomes irreversible.
       We have no great affection for the President, who has 
     systematically betrayed almost everyone and everything for 
     which he professed to stand during his six years in office. 
     But those failings should not obscure the great danger posed 
     by the possibility of Starr and his minions forcing Bill 
     Clinton out of office. Whatever the degree of the President's 
     responsibility for bringing this calamitous situation on his 
     own head--and that responsibility is considerable--the nation 
     cannot allow itself to be decapitated by what is, at its 
     core, a politically motivated witch hunt.
       Clinton's actions ought not to be the subject of an 
     impeachment inquiry. Starr went after possibly more serious 
     allegations against the President related to Whitewater, 
     Filegate and Travelgate, but despite a nearly crazed 
     obsession with nailing his prey, he apparently came up empty-
     handed. He has therefore been forced to base an impeachment 
     case entirely on Clinton's adulterous affair and attempts to 
     cover it up.
       A principled man, comfortable with himself and the 
     Constitution, should be able to argue that no citizen may be 
     compelled to testify about intimate details of his sex life 
     unless there is a showing of transcendent public need. 
     Clinton could have invoked provisions of the First, Fourth 
     and Fifth amendments to create a zone of privacy, a so-called 
     intimacy privilege. But instead, Clinton appears to have 
     lied--more than once. Let the lawyers argue whether this 
     technically qualifies as perjury. Clinton would be wise to 
     quit quibbling and rely on the good sense of the American 
     people to see that Congress addresses this transgression 
     (which does not compare with Clinton's more serious failures 
     in addressing the nation's problems of growing corporate 
     power and inequality) with a punishment that fits the crime. 
     One of the most striking aspects of this surreal situation 
     has been the consistency of the public's insistence that what 
     happened between Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton is their 
     own business, and that of their families. The punditocracy's 
     obsession with the salacious details of Oval Office sex has 
     been matched by its hypocrisy in playing morality police to 
     an audience that does not care what the pundits think.
       The Constitution says that Congress shall impeach only for 
     ``treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.'' 
     The President's lawyers are on firm ground when they assert, 
     ``The impeachment clause was designed to protect our country 
     against a President who was using his official powers against 
     the nation, against the American people, against our society. 
     It was never designed to allow a political body to force a 
     President from office for a very personal mistake.''
       This inquiry has been driven by politics from the start. 
     Kenneth Starr is a partisan conservative Republican who has 
     been the spearhead of an unprincipled, well-funded attack on 
     the Administration almost from the moment it took office. 
     Lest we forget: Starr, former chief of staff to Reagan 
     Attorney General William French Smith, was chosen for his 
     current job in 1994 by a three-judge panel that itself was 
     selected by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who would 
     preside over the Senate in the event of an impeachment 
     trial. Starr considered writing an amicus brief to advance 
     Paula Jones's case against the President. Starr continued, 
     as a million-dollar-a-year lawyer, to represent the 
     tobacco industry while investigating Clinton and planned 
     to accept a Richard Mellon Scaife-funded deanship at 
     Pepperdine University until a national uproar forced him 
     to give it up. And Starr's office is under investigation 
     for the unprofessional and possibly illegal manner in 
     which it leaked information designed to damage the 
     President.
       Whether it achieves its goal of inspiring Clinton's 
     impeachment, Starr's investigation has succeeded beyond its 
     originators' wildest dreams. It has crippled the 
     Administration and the Democratic Party. What the 
     conservatives could not stop by election they have thwarted 
     by investigation. This Congress saw no important legislation 
     passed on tobacco and children, education, childcare, minimum 
     wage or campaign finance reform. Not much planning for the 
     future appears to be under way in the White House, as 
     Democrats run for cover in hopes of surviving what could be 
     major Republican gains come November.
       More significant, however, is the damage that Starr and his 
     team have done to time-honored constitutional prerogatives 
     and common decency. President Clinton's right to privacy has 
     been shredded. Starr has used his unlimited powers to 
     threaten White House staff and to intimidate Lewinsky and her 
     family. He has eviscerated the right of attorney-client 
     privilege for public officials, and he has abused the grand 
     jury system. And the hymn-singing, Bible-quoting Starr has 
     produced the best-read piece of Puritan pornography in human 
     history. In his zeal to remove the President, he has 
     transformed the American political process into an exercise 
     in voyeurism.
       Rather than needlessly drag the country through the 
     degrading process of impeachment hearings based on Starr's 
     document, the House Judiciary Committee might consider 
     conducting a debate that assumes the truth of all the 
     allegations in the Starr report. The question for the 
     committee would then become: Are these charges serious enough 
     to rise to the level of being ``high crimes and 
     misdemeanors''? If not, in what would essentially be the 
     granting of a motion to dismiss, the committee could decide 
     not to present the House with articles of impeachment. The 
     process could stop right there. It would then remain only for 
     Congress to decide whether to drop the matter or to censure 
     the President, in a form to be determined. The President, for 
     his part, could do his party and the country a favor by 
     admitting he lied and making clear that he would accept such 
     a censure. A censure resolution, if it comes to that, should 
     be narrowly focused on the nation's top law-enforcement 
     official lying under oath in his Paula Jones deposition. It 
     should not give credence to Starr's unproven claims of grand 
     jury perjury and obstruction of justice.
       Going forward, Congress should also insure, by way of 
     changes in statutes governing the independent counsel's 
     office, that no person will ever again be vested with the 
     uncontrolled power that Kenneth Starr has so effectively 
     misused. Inquisitions, sexual or otherwise, are 
     ``inappropriate'' in a constitutional democracy.

                                Starrism

       Everyone from Alan Dershowitz to a front-page classified 
     advertiser in the New York Times has sounded the alarm about 
     ``sexual McCarthyism'' in connection with Kenneth Starr, his 
     report and all the rest.
       The word ``McCarthyism,'' as many have pointed out [see 
     Navasky, ``Dialectical McCarthyism(s),'' July 20] is a 
     misnomer since it describes a phenomenon that began before 
     the junior senator from Wisconsin arrived on the scene and 
     persisted after he was retired from it. And each time this 
     umbrella term for the excesses of the anti-Communist crusade 
     is recycled as a metaphor for the latest political mugging, 
     it loses something of its original power and precision as a 
     description of a social pathology.
       Moreover, in the case of Starr & Co. the metaphor seems 
     inexact because McCarthy was notorious for the sloppiness of 
     his methods, the manipulation of numbers (first there were 
     205, then fifty-seven, then eighty-one card-carrying 
     Communists in the State Department) and, as often as not, 
     getting the wrong guy. Whereas the sexual allegations against 
     Clinton appear to be well documented, and Starr seems 
     obsessively precise and meticulous (although the closer one 
     looks at his report the less confidence one has in its 
     integrity).
       Is ``sexual McCarthyism'' a misleading metaphor for what is 
     happening? Not really. Though there are obvious differences, 
     there are at least three significant similarities between 
     then and now. It's important to identify what they are before 
     too many reputations get shredded, too many democratic values 
     violated, too many dangerous precedents established, too much 
     privacy invaded.
       First and foremost, there is the attempt to demonize a 
     political target as the Enemy Other. Historians like the late 
     Frank Donner have demonstrated how the great Red hunt

[[Page E2047]]

     of the fifties exploited the nativist impulse, which 
     identifies the foreign with the radical and the immoral.
       In the days of the domestic cold war it meant Hoover, 
     McCarthy, Nixon, HUAC, et al.--cheered on by such as the Rev. 
     Billy Graham and the American Legion--arguing that to be a 
     Communist (or fellow traveler) was to be a ``dirty Red,'' an 
     agent of an international conspiracy, a spy. The reason 
     Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, about the Salem witch 
     trials of the 1600s, spoke so eloquently to the 1950s was 
     that just as there were no witches in Salem, there was no 
     internal Red menace in the United States of the fifties--no 
     Enemy Other that justified the hysteria that resulted in the 
     wholesale invasion of the rights and liberties of citizens.
       Today we have independent counsel Kenneth Starr, 
     Representatives Henry Hyde and Newt Gingrich, with Chief 
     Justice William Rehnquist waiting in the wings to preside 
     over impeachment proceedings in the Senate--cheered on by 
     such as the Christian Coalition and William Bennett--arguing 
     in effect that to have (dirty) sex in the Oval Office means 
     one should be thrown out of office. The Enemy Other is sexual 
     rather than political deviance, the target of opportunity is 
     the President rather than the CP. Arthur Miller's image of a 
     witch hunt fueled by repressed sexuality leading to a form of 
     cultural hysteria survives from the fifties to link the two 
     episodes.
       Second, the Red hunters of the fifties succeeded in 
     deploying the legal process to punish people for activities 
     that may have been politically and culturally anathema, but 
     in and of themselves were not crimes. During the fifties, 
     that meant summoning accused members of the Communist Party 
     (a legal organization) before official tribunals and asking 
     them questions the investigators knew would be difficult or 
     impossible for them to answer, thereby forcing them to choose 
     among silence (which landed the Hollywood Ten in prison for 
     contempt of Congress), blacklisting (which was visited on 
     anyone who invoked the Fifth) or betrayal (former comrades 
     who answered the $64 question--``Are you now or have you ever 
     been . . .?''--were next asked to name the names of others).
       Today Starr uses Clinton's unwillingness to testify about 
     the intimate details of his (perfectly legal) sex life, and 
     his inability--for reasons of Realpolitik--to invoke his 
     Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself, to try to 
     trap him into the crimes of perjury, obstruction of justice 
     and the abuse of power. When is the last time a ``target'' 
     was forced to answer questions, especially intimate ones, 
     before a grand jury?
       Third, in the fifties, under the rubric of national 
     security, the FBI and other investigative agencies routinely 
     violated the privacy and civil liberties of alleged 
     subversives via legally dubious wiretapping, bugging, the use 
     of informers and intrusive interrogations. Today, Linda 
     Tripp, acting in tandem with the independent counsel and 
     perhaps lawyers for Paula Jones, tries to induce Monica 
     Lewinsky to say things that can be used to entrap the 
     President in contradictory testimony. This may or may not 
     qualify as perjury or grounds for impeachment but is 
     calculated to cause personal and political embarrassment and 
     shame.
       The parade of analogies marches on. There were secret grand 
     jury leaks then; now the special prosecutor, in league with 
     the Republican majority, arranges for the entire grand jury 
     transcript to be circulated on the World Wide Web. The press 
     then was complicit with the McCarthyites in the sense that it 
     passively reported irresponsible charges on the front page 
     and didn't get around to publishing corrections until days 
     later, usually on page 47. These days the conglomerated and 
     highly technologized media are anything but passive. They are 
     leading the posse, attempting to whip up a political hysteria 
     that thus far the public seems disinclined to indulge. We are 
     lucky in that, for it would be a disastrous precedent--far 
     beyond what McCarthy wrought--to drive a President out of 
     office as a result of a public hubbub over his private 
     conduct.
       My own study of the McCarthy era led me to conclude that 
     the purpose of the Congressional and other investigations of 
     those years was not to write legislation or to develop new 
     information (HUAC, for example, already had obtained from 
     undercover agents all the names it was insisting witnesses 
     recite in public). Rather, the hearings and trials and 
     investigations of those years were for the most part 
     degradation ceremonies. One shudders at the prospect of 
     Congressional hearings or a Senate trial that recycles the 
     pornographic materials Starr claims it was necessary to 
     assemble. In the long run history has decided that it was not 
     HUAC's or McCarthy's targets that were degraded. It was the 
     country itself. Let us not let it happen again.--Victor 
     Navasky.

     

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