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?????????????????????????????????????????????????Friday, May 31, 2019
What it was like to be a Democrat who voted to impeach Bill Clinton
Today, crossing party lines on impeachment will get you ostracized by your party, as Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) knows all too well. Was it always this way?
Twenty years ago, five Democratic members of Congress voted to impeach
President Bill Clinton, a member of their own party. Two of those
lawmakers told The Fix that back then, lawmakers had much more freedom
to think for themselves.
"I really don't remember much pressure,” said Gene Taylor, a former
congressman from Mississippi and the only Democrat who voted for all
four articles of impeachment. “I think everyone understood that every
single member had to vote their conscience on that, and I think people
more or less left each other alone to their own decisions.”
Taylor said his decision to impeach Clinton was “remarkably cut and dry”
for him: Clinton broke the law when he lied under oath to a grand jury
about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. “We are a nation of laws,
and being a lawmaker, I thought it was very im
portant that the president be the one who obeys those laws,” he said. “It really was that simple.”
Paul McHale, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, also voted to impeach
Clinton. He was traveling abroad when The Fix reached him, so we spoke
briefly by email. Like Taylor, he said he does not regret his vote.
"Neither my judgment nor motivation has since changed,” McHale said,
pointing us to a speech he gave on the House floor explaining his vote:
“When the president took an oath to tell the truth, he was no different
at that point from any other citizen, both as a matter of morality and
as a matter of legal obligation,” McHale said in the speech. “We cannot
excuse that kind of misconduct because we happen to belong to the same
party as the president, or agree with him on issues, or feel tragically
that the removal of the president from office would be enormously
painful for the United States of America.”
The Clinton era was still a polarized one, and there were political
costs for those who crossed party lines to impeach Clinton. Of the five
Democrats who ultimately voted to impeach Clinton, three eventually
became Republican (including Taylor) and McHale worked in the George W.
Bush administration. However, none received the equivalent outcasting
that Amash has faced for saying he’s open to impeachment: a primary
challenger.
As I wrote last week,
in the Clinton era, there were more swing districts for both parties,
and there was an understanding among party leaders that vulnerable
members had to do what they had to do to represent their constituents
and stay elected. The people who broke from their party had
constituencies that were atypical from the rest of their party — one
Democrat who voted to impeach Clinton, Ralph Hall, represented rural
Texas, for example. Such a district doesn’t exist for Democrats anymore.
Both Taylor and McHale said they cast their vote to impeach Clinton with
future generations, future presidents in mind. McHale said that at the
end of his speech in particular he spoke “with President Trump — or
someone like him — in mind”:
“By his own misconduct, the president displayed his character and
defined it badly,” McHale said of Clinton at the time. “His actions were
not ‘inappropriate.’ They were predatory, reckless,
breathtakingly arrogant for a man already a defendant in a
sexual-harassment suit — whether or not that suit was politically
motivated. And if, in disgust or dismay, we were to sweep aside the
president’s immoral and illegal conduct, what dangerous precedent would
we set for the abuse of power by some future president of the United
States? We cannot define the president’s character. But we must define
our nation’s.”
When The Fix asked Taylor if he had any advice for Democrats in the
House today on whether to impeach Trump, he simply said: “Do the best
thing.”