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A document that Hillary Clinton helped write about half a century ago came back from the dead to threaten the man she could not defeat in 2016.
The bizarre, only in D.C. Twist is centered on a congressional report written by a bipartisan team of young lawyers including Hillary before Clinton and written in the throes of Watergate. So, unlike now, not a single legislator was alive the last time Congress deposed a president. They did not understand how to try to remove Richard Nixon from the White House. So they appealed to Clinton and an ambitious team of staff to delve into the history of the impeachment, which dates back to the fourteenth century in England: how was dismissal used? What were the justifications? Can we apply it to Nixon?
History continues below
The resulting document became a centerpiece of Congressional pressure to oust the Republican President from office. But then Nixon resigned. The memo has been buried.
It was only the first life of the report.
Ironically, the document was resurrected in the late 1990s. The Republicans used it happily to reinforce their unsuccessful attempt to oust President Bill Clinton, who is now her husband, now president of Clinton. Then he disappeared from the public consciousness – again.
Until now, that's it. the A 45-year-old report has become a textbook Democrat legislators and Democratic House advisers say they use it to determine if they have the resources to organize a large-scale impeachment campaign. scale against President Donald Trump, the same man who upset Hillary Clinton three years ago. offer for a trip back to the White House.
For the most part, Clinton, even indirectly, could have one last chance to achieve what she could not do in 2016: defeat Donald Trump.
"I can only say that the impeachment gods have a great sense of humor," said Alan Baron, an expert on the subject who imposed four congressional sanctions on federal judges, about the recurring role played by Hillary Clinton in this story.
It started in early 1974.
The walls were closing on a besieged Richard Nixon. His helpers went down one by one. He had tried – and failed – to stop inquiries into his cleaning house behavior during the infamous "Saturday Night Massacre".
Hillary Rodham, a 26-year-old law graduate, was hired by the Judiciary Committee of the Capitol House of Representatives to work on bipartite work to determine whether or not to dismiss Nixon. She joined a team of future lawyers, including Bill Weld, who would continue his distinguished career as senior attorney for the Justice Department, governor of Massachusetts, and more recently, as the main challenger of the 2020 GOP against Trump.
Just months before the end of the Watergate scandal, the team took an in-depth look at the constitutional and legal documents related to the litany dating from the founding of the country, as well as the secular newspaper clippings of the Library. of Congress.
The resulting title of the report, "Constitutional Motives for the Removal of the President," may cause yawning. But what they have produced has become a defining 64-page roadmap with appendices examining what constitutes an impenetrable offense.
At the time, legislators needed advice. They had not had to think seriously about these issues for more than 100 years, when Congress rebelled against President Andrew Johnson for managing the post-civil war reconstruction.
The search for staff led the way in presenting an accessible argument that a president is not required to commit a categorical crime for Congress to consider the historic stage of impeachment.
"The writers have not written a fixed standard. Instead, they have adopted from English history a sufficiently general and flexible standard to deal with future circumstances and events, the nature and character of which they could not foresee, "wrote the House staff, including the future first lady, on the ill-defined constitutional functioning of the Constitution. "Crimes and high crimes."
Their comprehensive report also included a flash history lesson on how the founders of America had been well versed in impeachment when they included the wording in several articles of the Constitution – the British Parliament used the impeachment process to control kingship for over 400 years, dating back to the 14th century.
And the process was not simply used to remove suspected criminals. In the United States, 83 indictments were passed in the House against a dozen federal judges, a senator and Andrew Johnson, and less than a third actually involved specific criminal acts. Much more commonly, they wrote, was that the House was dealing with allegations that someone would have violated his duties, sworn or seriously undermined public confidence in his ability to acquit himself of his official duties.
"Because the removal of a president is a serious step for the nation, it must be based only on conduct that is seriously incompatible with the constitutional form and principles of our government or with the proper performance of the constitutional duties of the state. presidency, "said the staff of the House. concluded.
While the paper produced by Hillary Rodham and his colleagues was referred to as a team report, the Democrats-led House Judiciary Committee has always used it to justify his historic votes against Nixon. In fact, two of the three impeachment articles adopted by the powerful committee – dealing with the Republican President's abuses of power and Congressional disregard – did not cover areas clearly falling under the category of federal crimes. A final staff report submitted to the House just days after Nixon made history as the first president to resign, cited in an earlier staff analysis.
More than two decades later, Clinton may have wished he had never participated in writing the document.
It was 1997, eight months before the scandal Monica Lewinsky made the headlines. President Bill Clinton was faced with Republican indignation over numerous allegations, ranging from allegations of irregularities in the funding of the Whitewater election campaign, to the investigation of real estate investments of Clinton in Arkansas. To legitimize their anger, some Republicans turned to a document that had probably not been discussed for a generation – the 1974 impeachment report that Hillary Clinton had worked on.
Georgia GOP Rep. Bob Barr resurfaced the report in a sarcastic editorial in The Wall Street Journal, which opened with the phrase "Dear Mrs.". Clinton ".
The conservative congressman then thanked the first lady for giving legislators a "road map" to consider dismissing her husband with a report that "seems objective, fair, well-researched and consistent with other documents reflecting and commenting on the dismissal.
"And it's just as relevant today as it was 23 years ago," he added.
At one point, both parties cited the report of the Judiciary Committee's 1974 staff in which they argued over whether the sexual conduct between President Clinton and Lewinsky merited removal.
Considering the Watergate document as "historic," the Virginia GOP representative in Virginia, Bob Goodlatte, argued in the fall of 1998 that Clinton's offenses, such as those of Nixon, went beyond the issues of obstruction. to justice to find out if the president betrayed public trust. Then-Rep. Charles Canady, a Republican from Florida chairing a subcommittee of the Constitutional Chamber, repeatedly referred to the work of the Watergate panel discussion in the House and then to the Clinton Senate trial, which finally resulted in his acquittal.
The Democrats, on the other hand, had a different reading of the group's conclusions.
California Representative Zoe Lofgren, who had worked for a member of the Judiciary Committee during Watergate, shared copies of the 20-year-old report with colleagues from both sides and posted a link online – she had received an offer from the Faculty of Law. Students must type it to be verbally searchable but the internal rules of ethics prevent it. His main argument was that Clinton's lies about his relationship with Lewinsky, though immoral, did not correspond to the historical precedents described as qualifying for impeachment in the 1974 staff analysis.
"Interestingly, they cited it for reasons they did not support. I wonder if they've read them or they've prepared index cards by their staff, "Lofgren said in a recent interview about Republicans who used the report to justify Clinton's dismissal.
Ted Kalo, a former Democratic Counselor on the Judiciary Committee, said there was a general bipartisan agreement that accorded importance to the Watergate staff report, even because of differing interpretations.
"Great books were written and eloquent testimonies were presented at the 1998 hearing on the subject, but even in 1998, the 1974 staff report was considered to be at the cutting edge of technology," he said. he declared.
"This is the most concise and easy-to-understand document on the history of the impeachment clause and the intention of the perpetrators, including the question of what constitutes an impenetrable crime that I have encountered. And it accurately and logically describes what was supposed to be the appropriate scope of the House's removal power, "he added.
It's 2019. President Donald Trump is a no-charge criminal co-conspirator who has spurned the myriad of congressional problems and has seen his associates jailed following an investigation into the Trump campaign. Most Democrats – not to mention their fervent progressive base – are calling for dismissal. And again, the 1974 impeachment report is re-read on Capitol Hill.
As suggested by the Watergate staff, the ongoing House Democrat-driven impeachment investigation has gone beyond the criminal allegations that special advocate Robert Mueller investigated – a plot to defraud the United States and impede to justice – in a broader list of grievances, covering everything from the public finance violations campaign, to self-competition offenses, to abuse of power and to the deterioration of the judicial system and the media.
Senior members dusted the document for their new colleagues. Lofgren, for his part, asked his staff to post a new link to the Watergate document in mid-May 2017, shortly after Trump's dismissal by FBI director James Comey and Mueller.
"I just thought that while people were making suggestions, it was a very tight job and I think it was an excellent scholarship and it would be useful to offer it to the public," said Lofgren.
Others have referred to the 1974 document as a reason for Democrats to go faster.
Michael Conway, a former member of the Judiciary Committee in 1974 and a long-time friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, quoted the report in an NBC editorial in March, which dismissed the reluctance of House Democratic leaders to adopt an enforcement procedure. accusation against Trump.
He criticized the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, for explaining that the impeachment procedure can only be pursued if investigations are conducted, which are "overwhelming, convincing and bipartite". This does not correspond to what the 1974 researchers showed.
"The dismissal myths they have distorted remain relevant to Democrats who plan to exercise that power today," Conway said.
Michael Gerhardt, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, who has written books on impeachment and testified before Congress on the subject, said the Watergate committee's report "easily resisted the "Test of time" until 2019.
"It is as good as any other document prepared on the origins and scope of the federal removal process. He is appropriately authoritative. So it's as relevant to President Trump as to all the other presidents since Nixon, "he said.
Gerhardt said the Republicans who had adopted the report during Bill Clinton's removal should, for the sake of consistency, be open to what he now told them in Trump's case, but he also acknowledged that there was had new political limits. To begin with, Democrats and Republican collaborators have written the Watergate Report together.
"It seems impossible that a joint staff is conceivable on an extremely important issue," he said in an e-mail. "It shows how far we have come since 1974."
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