BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
The impeachment trial of William Clinton opened January 7
with conservatives in the Senate stepping up the pressure to
remove him from the Oval Office. At the same time, a layer of
bourgeois politicians and pundits are expressing nervousness
that the impeachment crisis is on the verge of spinning out of
control, which could further deepen the instability of the
world capitalist system.
"First Mr. Clinton demeaned the Presidency with his reckless affair..., and now the House Republicans have matched him with a reckless bill of impeachment over something that doesn't come close to a high crime against the Constitution," New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote January 8. "They both need to be stopped before they do any more damage to our sacred institutions. And that's why I favor censure.... I favor censure not because it's the most just and moral way to bring this case to a close, but because it's the fastest," he continued. "Now I pray only for damage control. When there is no one to root for, all you can root for is `The End.'"
The House Republican "managers" who will prosecute the case against Clinton say they want testimony from witnesses including former White House employee Monica Lewinsky and possibly several other women who claim Clinton made sexual advances toward them. Clinton's affair with Lewinsky and his failed attempts to cover it up triggered the yearlong scandal.
The issue of witnesses has not been resolved as Democrats say the 60,000 pages of evidence is sufficient to make a judgment on Clinton. "We know the facts," said Democratic Sen. Thomas Daschle.
"The notion of holding a trial with witnesses banned is preposterous on its face," exclaimed an editorial in the Wall Street Journal January 12. The article demanded that the Senate "hold this President to account."
Sordid details of Clinton's sexual encounters with Lewinsky have already been presented in his testimony to a grand jury August 17 last year. On September 21 the three major broadcast networks and four cable TV stations publicly aired the entire four hours of the hearing. The next day newspapers across the country ran special supplements featuring excerpts of this testimony.
Video equipment will be available on the Senate floor to show portions of Clinton's grand jury testimony and an earlier disposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. On January 12 Clinton sent $850,000 to Jones to settle that lawsuit.
Meanwhile, Republicans have dropped their clamor for Clinton to postpone the January 19 State of the Union address until after the impeachment trial.
The New York Times editors demanded January 12 that Clinton be allowed to speak, saying he "has a right to demonstrate that the public does not want him removed from office." They suggested Clinton confess to his misdeeds in the speech, which "might well tilt the balance toward censure."
Ultrarightist politician Patrick Buchanan has seized on this scandal to press his "cultural war" with demagogic cries against the "corrupt elite" in Washington. "Monicagate is a battlefield in the war for the soul of America, a war that is religious and cultural in character, as well as political," he declared in a column last September.
The right-wing ideological offensive that's the motor force of the impeachment campaign against Clinton is opposed by the majority of working people.
This is reflected in comments by conservative columnist William Safire. In a column in the January 11 New York Times, Safire said a majority in the country remains "loyal" to Clinton despite the scandal that has surrounded his presidency. "Some don't want to deal with public unpleasantness. Others don't want snoops prying into their own private lives," he wrote. "Add those to the hard-core liberals and minorities who see their man as a firewall against spreading lava from the right."
Another element behind this resistance to the impeachment drive is probably opposition to "the Kulturkampf [cultural war] with its weapons of messy personal destruction," Safire observed.
Liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert continued his attacks on conservative figures handling the impeachment trial in the Senate like Sen. Strom Thurmond and Chief Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. "The two of them were enemies of black Americans," wrote Herbert.
The racist ties of the two conservative politicians leading the impeachment charge against Clinton has recently surfaced in the bourgeois media. On January 13 the Washington Post reported that Rep. Robert Barr has addressed meetings of the Council of Conservative Citizens along with Senate majority leader Trent Lott. Lott, who has recently distanced himself from CCC, has maintained relations with the group in its 10 years of existence.
The organization was built by supporters of the now-defunct White Citizens Councils and John Birch Society. Its leaders call for promoting the "heritage" of the slavocracy with Confederate monuments and displays of the Confederate flag. They oppose Supreme Court rulings ordering desegregation of public facilities, call for tougher immigration control, and restoring "states' rights" - the battle cry of the slave-owning class in the U.S. Civil War.
"We are going to be a majority nonwhite nation in a couple of years," said Gordon Baum, chief executive officer of the Council of Conservative Citizens. "Is that a legitimate concern? Yes it is. We won't back away from that."
As early as the spring of 1989, the Citizen's Informer ran a picture of Lott with relatives, Frank Hodges and Arnie Watson, who are members of the Carroll County Citizens Council in Mississippi. The summer 1997 issue ran a picture of Lott meeting at his office with CCC national officers. And William Lord, the Council's senior field coordinator, has twice served as Lott's campaign chairman in Carroll County.
This organization, built not only by supporters of the segregationist White Citizens Councils but also by backers of the John Birch society and activists in the presidential campaigns of then-Alabama governor George Wallace, has strong political ties to the Republican Party in the South as well as to the conservative wing of the southern Democratic Party.
The CCC raised thousands of dollars for the defense of a supporter, Byron De La Beckwith, who was convicted in 1994 of murdering civil rights leader Medgar Evers 31 years earlier.
The organization's ties to the Democratic Party are the strongest in Mississippi, where 34 legislators, most of them Democrats, are members of the Council of Conservative Citizens. Most politicians that belong to the group, however, are Republicans. The Informer, the organization's publication, regularly publishes a column Lott writes and distributes from his Senate office.
Meanwhile, Rep. Barr, one of the 13 "managers" who will prosecute Clinton, and the first member of the House of Representatives to demand the president's impeachment, was accused by pornographic magazine publisher Larry Flynt of encouraging one of his two ex-wives wife to have an abortion. Barr had switched from supporting a woman's right to choose abortion to opposing the right to choose during an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1992.
Flynt ran an ad in the October 4 Washington Post offering up to $1 million in exchange for evidence of illicit sexual relations, fueling the pornorgraphication of politics in the name of exposing hypocrisy among prominent politicians. Flynt charged Barr with committing adultery and lying about it during court proceedings to divorce his ex-wife. The Hustler magazine publisher said he paid Barr's ex-wife for an affidavit stating that she believed the congressman was having an affair.