What do we do now?

Just when we thought it was safe to get back to the nation's business, and after a year of impeachment trauma and all-Monica-all-thetime, come allegations from the woman formerly known as Jane Doe No. 5. Lisa Myers' interview on NBC-TV, and press accounts in the Chicago Tribune and other papers, with this woman, Juanita Broaddrick. paint a credible, although unprovable, picture of William Jefferson Clinton, when he was attorney general of Arkansas, as a vicious rapist

One can now go on the Internet and find suggestions that some of what Mr. Clinton is accused of having done to Mrs. Broaddrick more than 20 years ago was repeated, with variations, to several other women, including when he was a student at Yale, when he was a student at Oxford, when he was governor of Arkansas, and even on a visit to Washington, D.C., when he was contemplating a run for the White House.

What should be done about the proliferating accusations that the President is a sexual predator? Most Americans may well be inclined simp_ to ignore the whole mess, hoping it will go away, and perhaps be content to believe that these accusations are simply the work of the President's enemies, who never accepted him or his election as legitimate.

Heinous Crimes Are Impeachable Offenses

This was, of course, the analysis of Hillary Clinton, expressed last January, who claimed the existence of a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (VRWC) to do in her and her husband. So far, however, no credible link to the VRWC has been shown for Broaddrick's coming forward now.

If the Monica mess taught us anything, however, it is that the occupant of the Oval Office, where sexual dalliance is concerned, was less than fully truthful at best and guilty of obstruction of justice and perjury at worst.

At this point one might invoke Occam's razor and suggest that the simplest explanation is the best and that all the President's accusers are not part of a vast and complex conspiracy, but rather he cannot be trusted to tell the truth. His and his lawyer's denial regarding Broaddrick, then, are hardly convincing.

We must now face the possibility that the President is a serial sexual predator, and what this means for him and us. During the recent impeachment proceedings, some of us maintained that character and virtue were believed by the Framers to be requisite for the President and other high government officials.

While most of us agreed that impeachable offenses were normally those involving crimes against the state, there seemed to have been a rough consensus that if the President were guilty of some other types of heinous crimes-murder was a good exampleimpeachment ought to be available to remove him. Forcible rape under circumstances such as Broaddrick describes might well be another indication of a character so flawed that it could not be trusted with the executive power of the nation.

There is not enough evidence conclusively to establish the veracity of Broaddrick's account, as there often is not in cases of rape, let alone those that occurred two decades ago. Still, if the accounts of Clinton's predatory behavior with regard to women circulating on the Internet, several of which are more recent, are accurate, there is reason to believe that evidence could be produced that would establish that Clinton has a pattern of sexual aggressiveness toward women, mounting at times to criminal acts.

If these accounts prove to be true, then Broaddrick would be clearly more believable than the President, and it would be time to conclude the worst about him. That would include, it would seem, that he ought to be removed from office.

This is no longer a matter for the independent counsel, who has enough to do, and the independent counsel mechanism, soon probably to lapse, has been shown to have grave political difficulties. It is now, and always has been, the job of Congress to consider impeachment proceedings and to set about removing a President unfit for office.

Henry Hyde (R.-Ill.), the brave chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has indicated that investigating the President's sexual behavior was not the task of the House managers, and that is the reason the Broaddrick allegations were not brought to light.

The recent account in the Tribune reports that Chairman Hyde also quite reasonably feared that the President's defenders would use any effort to include tales of sexual misconduct in the impeachment proceedings as a means of ridiculing and disparaging the Judiciary Committee's efforts.

One hesitates to ask more of Henry Hyde and his courageous fellow House managers, but if what Broaddrick has said is true, and if the other accounts of predatory behavior stretching over two decades can be substantiated, it would seem that the House members' oath to preserve and protect the Constitution might require them once again to begin impeachment proceedings.

Mr. Presser is the Raoul Berger professor of legal history at Northwestern University School of Law and the co-author, with Douglas US Kmiec of The American Constitutional Order.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Mar 19, 1999
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