Those who support impeachment naturally think that the latter, refusing to impeach, is the greater threat. Allow a President to get away with suspected perjury and obstruction of justice, and, supposedly, Congress will countenance an irreparable tear in the seamless web of American justice. Impeach the President and, supposedly, the rule of law will be vindicated, if only in a symbolic way, proving forcefully that no American, not even the president, is above the law, and that the ladder of the law has no top and no bottom.

It will increase public cynicism about the rule of law.

Yet this argument is nonsense, logically and historically. As virtually every commentator before you has noted, American impeachment procedures have never been designed to try and to punish officeholders for criminal behavior. That is what trials before our courts are for -- local, state, and federal. If anyone were to claim that, short of a pardon, President Clinton is forever immune from prosecution, that would indeed represent a breakdown in the rule of law. But no one, not even among the President's staunchest supporters, has come close to suggesting as much. For his alleged crimes and misdemeanors, President Clinton remains highly vulnerable to any number of legal actions. He could be tried by a jury of his peers in a court of law once he leaves office. He could be sanctioned by Judge Susan Weber Wright if she holds that he gave false and misleading evidence in his deposition in the Paula Jones case. He could be disbarred. In short, he is decidedly not above the law.

Impeachment is reserved for a very select group of Americans, our highest officeholders and justices. It is not designed to root out crime -- for that, again, is the responsibility of the police and the courts -- but to root out severe abuses of power that pertain to those offices. To confuse the issue by conflating impeachment with ordinary judicial procedures is to do a deep disservice to our Constitution. It is also to denigrate the fundamental strength of the citizenry's basic devotion to the principles and practices of our American court system -- something which the failure to impeach President Clinton will not affect one iota, especially since, under that system, he will have gotten away with exactly nothing.

But what about the threat that this impeachment process poses to the rule of law? This entire procedure raises questions, beginning with the independent counsel law under which it began. By establishing prosecutors with unlimited resources, whose reputations depend upon bringing down their prey, the law encourages the remorseless search for the least bit of evidence of any sort of violation, no mater how technical, in the hope that something, anything might stick. We witnessed that process at work in the Iran-Contra affair, when Lawrence Walsh ['32] saw his prosecution of Oliver North for lying to Congress fail miserably when brought before a Washington jury. We witnessed it at work last week, when after spending $17 million of the taxpayers' money, Donald Smaltz saw all thirty counts he brought against Michael Espy get rejected by a jury. And, when all is said and done, I believe we will see that a similar process has been at work along the long and winding road that began with Whitewater and has brought us to this chamber today. As Jeffrey Rosen of the George Washington University Law School wrote recently in The New York Times, "If House Republicans fail to heed the lessons of the Espy investigation, our faith in the rule of law may be shaken in ways that we can only begin to imagine."

There are those who agree that the independent counsel law has gotten out of hand, but who protest that as long as it is in force, nothing can be done to stop the process. This is hogwash. There is nothing in the Independent Counsel law or in the Constitution which dictates that Congress is duty-bound to follow through to the bitter end each and every referral, especially if Members believe that the Independent Counsel statute is flawed. To paraphrase Brendan Sullivan, Oliver North's attorney, during the Iran-Contra hearings, Congress is not a potted plant. In the case of President Clinton, Congress decided to press ahead, rashly I believe. But it can always choose to take another direction as it sees fit. In any event, responsibility for what occurs must rest with the Congress itself, and not with some mythic unalterable process initiated under a law that may very well soon be dropped or radically amended.

But there is something even more dangerous afoot, and it has to do with the increasingly cavalier attitude surrounding this impeachment here in Washington, and especially in the House of Representatives. To say that impeachment doesn't really matter because the Senate will acquit President Clinton is to take a frighteningly myopic view of the costs involved for the nation in pressing forward with a Senate trial. Even if the Senate does acquit, the trial will inspire widespread revulsion at Congress, for extending a nauseating process that the voters have repeatedly instructed Congress should cease. More important, it will increase public cynicism about the rule of law by raising serious questions about how easily prosecutors can manipulate criminal charges and judicial proceedings for partisan ends.

I began these remarks by discussing President Clinton's accountability for the current impeachment mess. By equivocating before the American people and before a federal grand jury, not to mention before his family and friends, he has disgraced the presidency and badly scarred his reputation. He has apologized and asked for forgiveness.

But now, as mandated by the Constitution, the matter rests with you, the Members of the House of Representatives. You may decide, as a body, to go through with impeachment, disregarding the letter as well as the spirit of the Constitution, defying the deliberate judgment of the people whom you are supposed to represent and, in some cases, deciding to do so out of anger and expedience. But if you decide to do this, you will have done far more to subvert respect for the Framers, for representative government, and for the rule of law than any crime that has been alleged against President Clinton. And your reputations will be darkened for as long as there are Americans who can tell the difference between the rule of law and the rule of politics.