<p>Clinton Impeached</p><p>The United States has seen only two presidents impeached. The impeachment process itself has been considered the ultimate constitutional safeguard against tyranny, what Benjamin Franklin called “a substitute for assassination.” The first president to be impeached, Andrew Johnson, was assailed by congressional Republicans shortly after the Civil War for instituting a program of southern reconstruction which gave the former masters virtually total control over the limits of freedom accorded to freedmen. The second president to suffer through impeachment was William J. Clinton. The circumstances of Clinton’s trial were very different from those of Johnson’s, but the passions he inspired, for good and ill, were nearly as intense. President Clinton was impeached on December 19, 1998, on the grounds that he obstructed justice in the Paula Jones civil case and gave false testimony to a federal grand jury. The House of Representatives, which is responsible for instigating impeachment proceedings, declined to charge the President with committing perjury and abuse of power. That impeachment proceeded on two grounds rather than four did not testify to a bastion of GOP support in the House, for those Republican Representatives had staunchly refused a Democratic plea simply to censure the President for reprehensible behavior. Clinton would have to wait through over two agonizing months as the Senate received the case from the House, took testimony, and debated whether or not he could continue as President. The nation, too, was engaged in a furious debate over impeachment. Republicans and their conservative supporters felt that they were taking a stand for morality and integrity. The President’s predicament flowed from an affair with the former young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and his efforts to conceal the moral lapse from lawyers in the Paula Jones case, the public, and apparently even his family. The Presidency was not only a position of legal and military leadership, Clinton’s adversaries argued, it was a uniquely visible symbol of America, and as such carried weighty responsibilities of moral leadership. Democrats and their liberal supporters argued that impeachment was intended to remove Presidents who clearly abused their power as Presidents, for misdeeds like treason or using office to harm opponents. They alleged that Republicans were bent on a destructive and hypocritical “sexual McCarthyism,” policing what people did in private intimate relations, though some prominent Republican and conservative leaders had themselves committed affairs. While the President’s trial eventually concluded, the national argument over what constitutes the personal and what constitutes the public, and which is most important, has not been resolved, and indeed is unlikely ever to be. </p><p>“Senate fails to convict President Clinton on impeachment” at http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1999/yearinreview/top.stories/01/index.html</p><p>“Investigating the President: the Trial” at http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/resources/1998/lewinsky/ and successive links</p>