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WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : Clinton Impeachment
Why these witnesses?
The racist and anti-Semitic subtext of the Senate impeachment trial
By Barry Grey
30 January 1999
Why Sidney Blumenthal, Vernon Jordan and Monica Lewinsky?
Is it purely a coincidence that two of the witnesses called by the
Republicans in the Senate impeachment trial are Jewish and the third is
black? Or is something else, something more sinister, involved?
It is true, of course, that all three figure prominently in the web of
speculation and half-truths that was woven by Independent Counsel Kenneth
Starr and augmented by the House prosecutors. The Republicans hope to
extract from Lewinsky a remark or two that can be portrayed as a major
piece of new and damning information against Clinton. And as far as they
are concerned, her mere presence on the witness stand has the value of
appealing to the most prurient instincts of the public.
Jordan, according to Starr and the Republican prosecutors, is the man who
pulled the strings to buy Lewinsky's silence with a job.
Blumenthal has testified that, shortly after the scandal broke last year,
Clinton described Lewinsky to him as a "stalker" who tried to force herself
on the President. The House managers hope to use such testimony before the
Senate to portray Clinton as a sexual predator and enemy of women's rights.
The Wall Street Journal, in a choice example of the cynicism that pervades
the impeachment campaign, ran a column on Friday pushing this line. Some
months back, prior to the immunity agreement reached between Lewinsky and
the independent counsel, the same newspaper published an editorial advising
Starr on how to deal with the former White House intern. The Journal urged
Starr to "indict the tart."
Lewinsky, Jordan and Blumenthal will be testifying under enormous pressure.
The threat of indictment hangs over all of them, and Starr has gone out of
his way to demonstrate his readiness to prosecute witnesses who don't
provide the testimony he wants, e.g., the jailing of Susan McDougal,
multiple indictments against Webster Hubbell and the indictment earlier
this month of Julie Hiatt Steele.
But there is another side to the prosecutors' calculations. Consider the
social types that abound in what the media politely calls the "conservative
base" of the Republican Party. It is by now well-documented that this base
includes the Council of Conservative Citizens, a racist and anti-Semitic
outfit formed 14 years ago by veterans of the segregationist White Citizens
Councils, the John Birch Society and the George Wallace movement.
Among the prominent supporters of this organization are several Republicans
at the center of the impeachment proceedings: House manager Bob Barr of
Georgia, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, and North Carolina Senator
Jesse Helms. The Washington Post reported Friday that the CCC had to cut
off e-mail postings by members to its electronic "mailroom" after being
inundated with messages supporting former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke
and defending his denunciations of Jews.
Typical was a message from "Tom," which read: "There is no question in my
mind that organized Jewish groups are out to destroy anything they find
offensive. That includes southern culture, Christian based principles
taught in school, and white-dominated governments at every level."
Among the calculations of the right-wingers who dominate the Republican
Party is the knowledge that grilling Vernon Jordan, a wealthy and
influential black lawyer, humiliating Monica Lewinsky, and bullying Sidney
Blumenthal, a liberal Jewish journalist turned presidential aide, will, as
the saying goes, "energize their base."
In these circles, a commonly used epithet for people like Jordan begins
with the word "uppity."
But one suspects there is even more venom directed at Blumenthal. Before he
became an aide to Clinton in August of last year he was a political writer
for the Washington Post, the New Yorker and the New Republic. He earned the
hatred of Republicans and many in the media by denouncing the attacks on
the Clintons as the work of extreme right-wing forces.
The Republicans consider Blumenthal to have been a prime mover in Hillary
Clinton's statement on nationwide television a year ago that the Starr
investigation was part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy."
Last February Starr hauled him before his grand jury and threatened to
prosecute him for obstruction of justice, because he provided reporters
with information about abusive tactics carried out in the past by some of
Starr's deputies. Starr's prosecutors demanded that he name the reporters
he had spoken to and the information he had provided. Blumenthal refused to
answer, citing executive privilege. When he emerged from the grand jury he
told reporters, "If they think they intimidated me, they have failed."
Blumenthal was called back and forced to testify before the grand jury in
June, after the executive privilege claim had been struck down by the
courts. There can be no doubt that he is high on the list of Starr's future
victims.
But the decision to haul him before the Senate cannot be separated from the
bigoted views of those forces on which the Republican Party is increasingly
based, and to which it appeals. History has demonstrated repeatedly a
connection between the descent of bourgeois politics into reaction and
intrigue against democratic rights, and the encouragement of racism and
anti-Semitism. The present events in Washington are no exception.
See Also:
The Senate impeachment trial
Starr intervenes to salvage House Republicans' case against Clinton
[25 January 1999]
Networks fail to report Republican ties to racist groups
A curious silence
[20 January 1999]
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Readers: The WSWS invites your comments. Please send e-mail.
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Copyright 1998-99
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : Clinton Impeachment
Senate approves anti-democratic rules
Impeachment trial procedure violates due process
By the editorial board
30 January 1999
There comes the time in any major political struggle when a correspondence
begins to emerge between the goals of those waging the struggle and the
means which they employ to achieve those ends. The right-wing campaign to
depose the Clinton administration is a political coup d'etat, cloaked in
quasi-constitutional garb, whose goal is to impose new forms of rule on the
American people. The character of these new forms of rule can now glimpsed
in the anti-democratic methods used by the Senate Republican majority in
the trial of the president.
The congressional Republicans have adopted a procedure which rides
roughshod over the Constitution, disregards essential principles of due
process and sets extraordinary precedents for the wholesale violation of
the democratic rights of the American people. If the right-wing enemies of
the White House can organize such an assault on the President of the United
States, they can do it to anyone.
The central trick of the Republicans is a classic Catch 22. They evaded the
constitutional requirement for impeachment--the commission of "high crimes
and misdemeanors" against the state--claiming that the charges against
Clinton should be handled no differently than any other criminal case. They
claimed to be upholding "the rule of law," arguing that Clinton should be
treated the same as any other defendant--although the result of impeachment
and conviction would be, not the punishment of an individual, but the
overturning of two presidential elections.
But now that Clinton is on trial before the Senate on charges of perjury
and obstruction of justice, the Republicans claim that it is not necessary
to accord Clinton the due process rights to which any ordinary defendant
would be entitled, on the grounds that this is a political and not a
juridical process!
The result is that the Republicans have denied Clinton both the rights
which the Constitution provides a chief executive facing impeachment in a
political trial and the rights which the 14th Amendment guarantees to any
ordinary defendant in a criminal case. The rules adopted January 28 by the
Senate, in a straight party-line vote, are fit only for a Star Chamber
proceeding.
•There is no presumption of innocence and no standard of proof "beyond a
reasonable doubt," as would be required in any criminal case. Many
Republican Senators--and some Democrats--had publicly declared Clinton
guilty long before his impeachment. The standard of proof is arbitrary:
whatever it takes to convince a Senator to vote to convict. The judicial
decisions are taken, not in an open courtroom where the public can observe,
but in closed-door debates.
•The charges against Clinton remain ill defined and vague. Any criminal
perjury indictment, for instance, would have to spell out the exact words
held to be perjurious. The article of impeachment adopted by the House does
not do this, instead alleging perjury in general, and allowing Senate
"jurors" to select one or another statement as they please.
•Clinton's attorneys have not been given access to the same evidence as the
prosecution. More than 50,000 pages of documents in the hands of the House
prosecutors have been withheld from White House lawyers. Withholding even
one such document would be grounds for sanctions against the prosecution in
an ordinary criminal trial, and such a wholesale withholding of evidence
would be grounds for immediate dismissal.
•One of the most important preliminaries to a criminal trial is the
discovery procedure, under which defense attorneys are accorded subpoena
powers, giving them the right to compel witnesses to testify and to order
the production of documents deemed necessary for their case. As attorney
David Kendall pointed out last week in arguments to the Senate, no such
powers have been accorded to Clinton's lawyers at any stage in the
year-long Lewinsky affair.
•The selection of defense witnesses is arbitrarily limited. Under the
procedure adopted Thursday by the Senate, White House lawyers will have 24
hours after the deposition testimony of Monica Lewinsky, Sidney Blumenthal
and Vernon Jordan is completed, to decide which additional witnesses to
call. Each of these witnesses must be approved by a majority vote of the
Senate. In an ordinary trial, the defense would have virtually unlimited
right to call witnesses and pursue alternative theories. In Clinton's
trial, if his lawyers wish to call witnesses who could testify about the
right-wing conspiracy to entrap the president--figures such as Linda Tripp,
Paula Jones's attorneys, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, etc.--they can
only do so with the permission of the Republican majority.
•In an ordinary criminal trial, the defendant has an absolute right to
refuse to testify. Clinton was already compelled to testify against himself
once, in violation of his Fifth Amendment rights, when he was called before
the grand jury last August. In December he answered an additional 81
questions posed by the House Judiciary Committee Republicans. Now Senate
Republicans have drafted additional ten questions--many of them openly
hostile and argumentative--and House prosecutors have called on the Senate
to compel Clinton to testify in person.
Last Wednesday's vote on the resolution to dismiss the charges against
Clinton, offered by the senior Senate Democrat Robert Byrd, should have
marked the end of the impeachment trial as a political process. The 44
votes for dismissal of the charges were far more than the 34 necessary to
prevent Clinton's conviction and removal from office.
Undeterred by the vote, however, the Republican prosecutors have pressed
forward with demands that would only be appropriate for a criminal
trial--the calling of witnesses, deposition testimony, and further
arguments--in a last-ditch effort to keep the impeachment case going even
though its political outcome has presumably been determined.
Proposal for "fact-finding"
This has been accompanied by the proposal, endorsed by numerous Senate
Republicans, that the Senate might adopt a two-stage procedure, first
adopting a "finding of facts" by majority vote, which would declare Clinton
guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice, then a second vote on his
conviction and removal from office, which would require a two-thirds vote.
The procedure is blatantly unconstitutional, as even several Republican
Senators have suggested. Only a month ago, after the House impeachment
vote, Senate Republicans denounced suggestions that they draft a censure
resolution, claiming that the Senate could not censure because there is no
specific provision for it in the Constitution. Now they are preparing to
ride roughshod over the clear constitutional requirement of a two-thirds
vote to remove a sitting president, inventing a new "fact-finding" process
whose purpose is to intensify the pressure on Clinton to resign.
The planned "fact-finding" is also utterly undemocratic. In any judicial
proceeding, the charges brought by prosecutors are not facts, but mere
allegations. It is not enough, as first Kenneth Starr and then the House
managers did, to amass thousands of pages of testimony. In order to be
considered factual, this testimony must first pass the rigorous test of
cross-examination and verification. The salient "fact" of the case against
Clinton is that not one of the dozens of witnesses has ever been
cross-examined by a defense attorney. Not a single piece of evidence has
been corroborated in an adversarial proceeding.
Much of the material introduced by the House prosecutors would have been
rejected as hearsay, speculation or unproven hypothesis in any trial with
an independent presiding judge. But in the Senate trial, the Republican
majority acts as both judge and jury, deciding what evidence it will hear
and, as will be seen shortly, what evidence it will not hear.
The Senate trial of Clinton has degenerated into a farcical affront to
democratic principles. The flagrant violations of constitutional principles
demonstrates the aim of the campaign against the White House: to overturn
the results of the elections through conspiratorial means, to install a
new, radically right-wing regime whose policies could never be imposed by
democratic methods, to attack the democratic rights of the American people
as a whole.
Most seriously, an onslaught of such scope and such historic significance
has been carried to the brink of success, aided and abetted by the servile
mass media, and with little or no opposition from the Democratic Party and
from those organizations which purport to defend civil liberties and due
process. This by itself should sound the alarm among working people and
underscore the necessity of a political struggle in defense of basic
democratic rights.
See Also:
Why these witnesses?
The racist and anti-Semitic subtext of the Senate impeachment trial
[30 January 1999]
The Senate impeachment trial:
Starr intervenes to salvage House Republicans' case against Clinton
[25 Janaury 1999]
The Senate impeachment trial:
White House lawyers expose legal frame-up
[23 January 1999]
Top of page
Readers: The WSWS invites your comments. Please send e-mail.
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Copyright 1998-99
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
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