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BY MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ Washington, D.C., Jan. 3, 2000 -- As the Senate prepares to reconvene the impeachment trial of President Clinton, House managers today renewed their campaign to stage "live reenactments" of Monica Lewinsky's "private encounters" with the president, insisting that the reenactments would not cause the trial to "drag on unnecessarily." "This is not an attempt to embarrass the president," said Rep. Henry Hyde, R.-Ill., on "Meet the Press" Sunday morning. "There is a very serious question here as to whether this body can be said to have discharged its solemn constitutional duty when it hasn't even begun to look into the specific substance of the first article of impeachment." The first impeachment article, approved by the House of Representatives in December 1998, charges the president with perjury in his grand jury testimony of August of that year. At issue in the debate over reenactments is the question of whether Lewinsky's encounters with the president did in fact meet the definition of "sex" as laid out in the Paula Jones lawsuit, to which the president's grand jury testimony refers. In recent weeks, House managers have been unanimous in their support of reenacting the affair between Lewinsky and the president, saying that it will clear up key issues that remain "murky" and "inconclusive," in the words of Rep. Asa Hutchinson, R.-Ark. "The nation cannot properly judge whether this president is guilty of the high crimes and misdemeanors that warrant his removal from office," Hutchinson said on "Face the Nation," "unless we can determine once and for all the extent of the president's many evasions with regard to the definition of 'sex' in the Jones case." Some House Republicans, however, were quick to add that the Paula Jones case itself is not at issue, since the House did not approve the impeachment article charging President Clinton with perjury in his deposition in the Jones lawsuit. "The real question here is not about Paula Jones, or the president's wanton sexual abuse of her and countless other women," said Rep. Bob Barr, R.-Ga., on Sunday's "Press the Nation." "The real question is whether the president can lie to a grand jury and never have his statements checked against the bedrock of fact. It is not remotely plausible, for instance, that a person could receive oral gratification from a young girl of Lewinsky's proportions without at some point touching her breasts. That, among other things, is what the Constitution determines us to require, er, I mean, requires us to determine." Moderate Republicans in the Senate remain undecided about the desirability of reenactments, fearing that simulated oral sex on the Senate floor might compromise the dignity of the upper chamber. Some, like Sen. Mitch McConnell, R.-Ky., have held out the possibility that only some of Lewinsky's sexual encounters with the president will be reenacted, rather than the "full 17" reportedly desired by House managers. "I don't know that we have to go over every single, ah, meeting," said McConnell on Sunday's "Meet the Face." "Surely after six or seven or nine we'll get the general idea." Support for "limited" reenactments, however, seemed to be eroding over the weekend, as the likelihood of an impending vote -- to be held perhaps as early as next week -- increased the chances that the Senate would once again break along party lines. "We simply want the members of the world's greatest deliberative body to have a chance to vote their consciences on the crucial matter of reenactments," said Rep. Bill McCollum, R.-Fla., yesterday on "Press the Meat." "We consider that to be the only truly democratic way of putting this sordid matter behind us and moving on with the business of the American people." Senate Democrats bristled at the suggestion that they were opposed to a democratic vote of conscience. "Look, this is getting silly," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D.-Iowa, in a televised press conference yesterday. "We've seen videotaped depositions, we've had a string of witnesses going all the way back to Bill Clinton's first extended groping of a waitress in 1974, we've even seen origami and diorama depictions of Clinton receiving oral sex in the Oval Office, and now it's all in the official record. Surely it's time for an up-or-down vote on the articles of impeachment." Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R.-Miss., however, pointed out that the origami and diorama versions of the Lewinsky-Clinton encounters, submitted to the Senate by House manager Rep. Charles Canady, R.-Fla., in early September, were "too abstract" and "left unresolved the question of precisely who was trying to gratify whom." Sen. Orrin Hatch, R.-Utah, agreed, adding that "six-inch figurines and folded-paper representations of the president's betrayal of his family and of all Americans are clearly inadequate to the rigorous constitutional standards of an impeachment trial. We need to see the real thing." Brushing off polls that showed Americans opposing live reenactments 72 percent to 28 percent, supporting the president's recent bombing of Chad by 88 percent to 12 percent and showing that a mere 16 percent of Americans would support a Republican candidate against such hypothetical opponents as the Scarecrow from "The Wizard of Oz" or the T-1000 device from "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," Rep. Hyde maintained his position that impeachment is not a "popularity contest." "If Jesus were here," said Rep. Hyde on Sunday's "Meet Your Maker," "He wouldn't be conducting polls and kowtowing to focus groups. He'd go straight to the live reenactments, and so should we."
Michael Bérubé is an English Professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. His recent books include "The Employment of English" and "Life As We Know It." |
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