Four days before the November elections, more than 400 scholars took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times (cost: $75,978), presenting themselves as “Historians in Defense of the Constitution” and opposing the impeachment of President Clinton.
Keen mavens of such ads have noticed among the signers -- in addition to the predominance of liberals and a few conservatives -- at least two dozen feminists, five senior members of the editorial collective of a journal that continues to call itself the Radical History Review while rethinking the radical critique of liberals that gave it birth, and at least a dozen other well-known academics on the left. (Full disclosure: I am a left historian, but would not have signed the ad had I been on those folks’ e-mail list.)
Readers should know that the interpretation of American constitutional history presented in the scholars’ ad is rooted in an abiding fear of democracy and a one-sided reading of constitutional history. Other historians see things differently, though. The 400 scholars who advertised in the Times clearly let their political convictions interfere with their scholarly judgment.
They were led by that lifelong Democratic Party flack, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (Christopher Hitchens noted in The Nation that a few days after the ad ran, Schlesinger showed up at the White House to receive the National Humanities Medal “in full fig.”) The other two organizers have been moving rightward: C. Vann Woodward, the historian whose famous liberalism withered in his angry response to the ‘60s, and Sean Wilentz, a talented former historian on the left who writes frequently in the rightward-surging New Republic.
The columnist David S. Broder, commenting in The Washington Post, said that the press conference at which scholars presented their statement “began on a relatively calm note and built to a tantrum.” Schlesinger, Broder wrote, “wound up sounding at times like James Carville in cap and gown.” According to Broder, Wilentz and Schlesinger drafted the statement. But why did so many who should have known better sign on to the pro-Democratic but deeply anti-democratic screed?
In a telling phrase, the ad worried about the “caprices of ... Congress.” Those haughty words echoed the worst of the aristocratic expression of the 1780s. The framers of the Constitution feared democracy. Under pressure from “the people out of doors,” the elites who drafted the Constitution accommodated popular radicalism by setting broad and inclusive criteria for the right to vote. And they wrote a democratic component into the government’s structure: the House of Representatives, whose members could be younger than Presidents and Senators, and who would be elected for shorter terms and, thus, be more directly accountable to the people. (The fact that the House, today, is the captive of conservative interests offers no more rationale to turn our backs on its democratic reason for being than bad jury decisions should influence us to turn against jury trials.)
The Presidency, on the other hand, was intended by the framers to be a barrier against democracy: They gave the President extraordinary powers, and provided that he be elected not by the people, but rather by the Electoral College, and that he be older than Senators and Representatives. Hamilton wanted an “elective monarch.” John Adams and others wanted the President to be addressed as “Your Highness,” “Your Majesty,” or “Your Excellency.” No wonder many ordinary people worried at the time about the creation of an office that seemed to imitate the British monarchy.
The strong Presidency was not the only model available at the time. In Common Sense, Thomas Paine called for a weak executive, single-house legislature, and frequent elections. The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 provided for a weak, 12-person executive council, one-third of whose members were to be elected each year, “to provide a barrier against establishing an inconvenient aristocracy.” Those democratic notions were overthrown in 1790 in Pennsylvania by the same tide that produced the U.S. Constitution.
Over time, with the growth of the Imperial Presidency (which Schlesinger has criticized when Republicans are in the White House), the early fears of the powers of the executive branch have been more than fulfilled. In the second half of the 20th century, most Presidents (including Clinton) have indeed committed impeachable offenses, far more serious than those with which Kenneth Starr has accused Clinton. For starters, think of Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Iran-Contra, and continuing attempts to assassinate foreign leaders.
What the scholars who signed the ad in the Times failed to note is that impeachment is one of the bulwarks against a bloated Presidency. To paraphrase Jefferson (speaking of the 1786 Shays’ Rebellion), a little impeachment now and then might be a good thing, refreshing the tree of liberty. But the scholars feared that our Imperial Presidency would be “diminished,” “crippled,” even “permanently disfigured.”
The fact is, the history of the Constitution has included the expansion of democratic provisions, with women’s suffrage and the end of slavery. The scholars who signed the ad know that, and yet they stated that impeachment would upset our entire “constitutional order,” “undermining our Constitution.” Their somewhat Borkian reading assumes that the Constitution is sacred and unchanging, a completed document. It is reminiscent of an older strand of historiography that saw in the writing of the Constitution, in George Bancroft’s phrase, “the movement of the divine power.”
A comparison between, on the one hand, impeachment efforts, and, on the other, Newt Gingrich’s resignation, helps us to see the one-sided and unprincipled quality of much current liberal thinking. Acknowledging the great differences between the Presidency and the House Speakership, and between Clinton’s and Gingrich’s woes -- Gingrich resigned, while Clinton risks being forced out -- we can still object to liberal inconsistencies. Liberal commentators have delighted (as I do) in popular forces from below bringing Gingrich down in an episode that has the distinct flavor of a parliamentary “no-confidence” vote (“Newtered,” said The Nation’s editorial on November 30, obtuse to its sexist terminology), while seeing the possible impeachment of the President as a threat to the Constitution. It’s hard not to conclude that the discrepancy represents a case of liberals worrying about Grand Issues only when it’s their guy who is in trouble.
I do not support the present attempts to impeach Clinton, which would, among other things, produce a wave of puritanism and sexual hypocrisy worse than that of the 1950s. (Feminist signers seem to have decided on a popular-front strategy, giving up on the kind of independent critique that came from earlier radical feminists, and instead silencing themselves by subordinating their politics to Schlesinger, Clinton, et al. There is certainly no mention in the ad of abortion, sexual harassment, child care, or any other feminist issue.)
I fear sexual McCarthyism, anti-abortion activism, and the rest of the right-wing package. But I do not fear impeachment per se. The very ambiguity of the constitutional criteria for impeachment -- nobody, whether a constitutional expert or the 400 scholars who advertised in the Times (and who were mostly not constitutional specialists), can speak with certainty about that -- opens the door to a more democratic system. Such a system would see political disagreement and lack of popular confidence as a reasonable basis for removing a President from office. Most governments in societies such as ours provide for recallable executives, as part of a democracy. Our system is the anomaly. Let our Constitution become more democratic.
So why the widespread terror of impeachment among scholars? Why so much fear and trembling about bringing down bad leaders? I think that many of the signers of the ad in the Times looked toward the election, started with support of Clinton and the Democrats, and got their constitutional reading from that.
Jesse Lemisch is a professor of history at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.
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