Partisanship has history with process

WASHINGTON - As the House Judiciary Committee weighed the fate of President Nixon more than 24 years ago, chairperson Peter Rodino Jr. of New Jersey blurted out to a reporter that he and the panel's 20 other Democrats were ready to vote for his impeachment.

Rodino's remark led outraged Republicans to complain that Nixon was being railroaded by the Democratic majority, a reaction similar to the charges of excessive partisanship House Democrats now level at a GOP-controlled Judiciary Committee considering whether to hold impeachment hearings on a Democratic president.

Michigan Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the committee who was a member during the Watergate hearings, insisted that things were different when Nixon was under fire. "This time, we've dumped process and fairness on its head," Conyers complained following the straight party-line vote Friday to release President Clinton's videotaped testimony in the Monica Lewinsky case, as well as page-upon-page of sexually graphic descriptions of their affair.

But as the Rodino episode demonstrates, partisan lines were sharply drawn during the Watergate scandal of the mid-1970s, much as they are during the Lewinsky affair of 1998.

"The Judiciary Committee was very clearly factionalized," said University of Wisconsin professor Stanley Kutler, author of "The Wars of Watergate."

Indeed, many believe the Democratic majority that oversaw the committee's Watergate hearings demonstrated their partisanship even before the proceedings started when they adopted a new interpretation of the impeachment process. Scrapping the narrow doctrine that impeachment was designed to cover only indictable criminal offenses, the committee staff staked out a broader view, defining the proceedings as "a constitutional safety valve ... flexible enough to cope with exigencies not now foreseeable."

In fact, partisanship has been a hallmark of politically significant impeachment cases through U.S. history. At the 1805 impeachment trial of Federalist Chief Justice Samuel Chase, not a single Federalist senator voted for conviction (Chase remained in office). Similarly, at the 1868 trial of President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, no Democratic senator voted for his removal (Johnson barely survived).

Still, the hostility between the two parties has been particularly savage during Watergate and the Lewinsky case, partly because Nixon and Clinton are politicians who bring out the deepest resentments among their political opponents.

"What Nixon was to liberal Democrats, Clinton is to conservative Republicans," said American Conservative Union chair David Keene.

Nixon had antagonized liberals from the start of his career by his use of what they viewed as red-baiting tactics in his pursuit of suspected Communist sympathizers. Democrats on the 1974 Judiciary Committee included, according to Kutler's study, "hard-core liberals who had grown up hating Richard Nixon (and) who saw their moment" to exact revenge.

09-21-98