Down In History

Every so often, before Election Day or a moon landing or the crowning of someone as the new King, we know in advance when history will be made, and so we set the table, bring out the good silver, choose our words a bit more carefully, because the moment is one for the record. It was in honor of that prospect that the tourists lined up in the rain outside the Capitol last Thursday morning, to win a place in the gallery where they could watch the House take up the issue that it has entertained only twice before in 224 years. Some of them brought the Federalist papers in their fanny packs. Security guards, whose job is to keep the chamber doors closed, propped them open to strain for a few words of debate. Some news shows carried it live.

As it turned out, the historic moment was as dismal as the characters that brought us to it. Into the chamber of John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, lawmakers invited Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. The legislators launched an inquiry into whether a President lied about sex under oath at a time in the nation's life when all their energy and attention might still not be sufficient to cope with a melting economy at home and elusive enemies overseas. And they did it in a way that suggested that the history they cared most about was their own.

The speeches were weightless, the arguments stale, the attendance sparse, the outcome rigged--largely because, as a White House veteran put it, "no one really believed what they were saying anyway: the Republicans don't want to impeach Clinton, and the Democrats don't want to let him off the hook." And so both sides went through the motions. One of the oldest Democratic members wandered out into the Speaker's gallery, coughed and spit on the floor. It was a day for disposable cameras, not oil paint.

But when the lawmakers were finished, they had made history in spite of themselves, adding a new member to a very select American club: Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and now Bill Clinton. In voting to open a broad impeachment inquiry, the House of Representatives cast Clinton into a tiny subset of American Presidents from which he will never be paroled, even pending good behavior. He became the third Commander in Chief to face the ignominy of an official impeachment investigation--not as bad as Nixon; worse than Johnson, whose impeachment was pure political payback by his cranky congressional opposition. It will forever be the asterisk after Clinton's name, a game-show question in the year 2020: Name the third American President to endure an impeachment inquiry.

If what transpired in the House seemed so inappropriately ordinary, that's because it was. This is not where debate happens; that belongs in the Senate. This isn't where reason presides; it was built as a People's House, the emotional crucible where boiling passions are supposed to spill over--to be cooled, as the Founders put it, in the saucer of the Upper House. So it wasn't all that strange Thursday morning that the most important constitutional debate in 24 years would be squeezed in between a class photo of the 105th Congress and a vote to award Teddy Roosevelt a posthumous Medal of Honor.