HOME / the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Thernstrom and Thernstrom

the breakfast table:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

No Censure

By Stephan Thernstrom
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 15, 1998, at 10:38 AM ET

Dear Abby,

RSS

Yes, of course the question is what the president did and whether it was conduct that disqualifies him to be chief executive, not what he feels about what he did.

The point has implications for this very odd business of censure. The censure of Andrew Jackson was a simple (and ultimately innocuous) expression of displeasure from Congress. Jackson condemned the move and dared Congress to impeach him. Such defiance seems presidential. The Clinton White House, on the other hand, is saying, in effect, look we can all get over this, feel okay again, if Congress will just agree to punish me. We can sit down together and decide on the punishment; I will say once again how horrible I feel, and will even pay a fine. And if I consent, it won't be a bill of attainder.

Aside from the unseemliness of it all, why should we let Clinton off the impeachment hook with a confession and perhaps a fine? Suppose Nixon had issued a statement. Suppose he had said: I'm really sorry. The charges are correct. I so lost perspective. I got into this paranoid state (it's a little problem for me), and I authorized disgraceful things.

Would anyone have cared?

The world then was far more dangerous to American interests than it is today, and Nixon could have said: I've got important foreign policy work to do. China, the Soviet Union, the little mess in Vietnam.

It wasn't an argument that could have worked--or should have worked. And not simply because Nixon's crimes were even worse than Clinton's.

I'll close with some wise words about the censure alternative from a historian who can hardly be dismissed as a right-wing extremist. In his 1973 book, The Imperial Presidency, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote, "if a president committed high crimes and misdemeanors, censure was not enough. The slap-on-the-wrist approach to presidential delinquency made little sense, constitutional or otherwise. The continuation of a lawbreaker as chief magistrate would be a strange way to exemplify law and order at home or to demonstrate American probity before the world."

Exactly.

Steve