The American Reporter

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WASHINGTON -- Last week I got a first-hand lesson on how sharp and incisive the electorate can be. Woe to the elected official who thinks constituents are sheep to be led to the voting booth.

The clash over the impeachment of President Clinton can be reduced to two reasonably held but philosophically different positions, Congressman Robert Ehrlich Jr. (R-Md.) told his audience.

One group, largely Democrats, thinks the issue is sex, and as such is not an impeachable offense. The other group, largely Republicans, believes the issues are obstruction of justice and perjury, both impeachable offenses. These are reasonable and important stances, Ehrlich emphasized, and they serve to show that Congress is honorable and determined to resolve differences in carrying out its Constitutional duties.

Ehrlich, who sides with the second group but works hard to separate himself from the bombast and demagoguery he sees on both sides, understandably gets a bit foggy on what defines perjury and obstruction of justice in the president's case. However, on one thing he's clear, the president's behavior with Monica Lewinsky was "juvenile" and not worthy of the office.

The three-term congressman's views were expressed during a church men's breakfast meeting I attended last week at which the audience made up of adult, male Maryland voters asked some pointed questions about social security, taxes, the proposal to forgive the debt of several poor nations, and the impeachment.

Clearly, Ehrlich did not want to talk at length about the impeachment proceedings and tried early to deflect the discussion. In a sense, however, his sex vs. law categorizations mildly poisoned the well by implying the other side focuses only on prurient interests while his side is concerned with Constitutional law.

After stating his position, he concluded the impeachment process was now the Senate's business. "Our business was to impeach," he said. "It's the Senate's business to try the case."

When the discussion eventually returned to the impeachment, Ehrlich made the somewhat exasperated remark, "Look, the president was having sex while he was on the telephone making the decision to send your sons and daughters into harm's way."

At that point, the congressman got a lesson on just how sharp the voters in his district can be and how even a slightly jingoistic remark can be picked up by intelligent critics.

"Don't you think," a quiet questioner began, "that in part it is only because we happen to know what he was doing that this is an issue? The real shame may be that he was deciding to send our sons and daughters into harm's way. We just happen to know what he was doing when he made the decision."

We don't know, the questioner implied, what other presidents happened to be doing when they committed American service members to battle on foreign soil.

The point deserves reflection.

What was John Kennedy doing when he made the decision to send forces into Cuba's Bay of Pigs? What was Richard Nixon doing when he made the decision to bolster U.S. forces in Vietnam after pledging to halt that conflict? And who knows the precise whereabouts or activities of Lyndon Johnson at the moment he decided to commit troops to Vietnam?

Congressman Ehrlich's questioner was underscoring an incisive point.

He was saying to the young Republican, you want us to see that the president's having sex while discussing national defense issues on the telephone was reprehensible, and with that we may be in full agreement. However, it doesn't follow naturally that the decision he made to place American sons and daughters into the line of fire was a fully acceptable and moral decision.

The condemnation of inappropriate sexual activity does not automatically justify inappropriate military actions. Let's clearly differentiate issues, the speaker might have said.

Ehrlich had come close to taking a bombastic, demagogue-like stance similar to those he condemned in his colleagues on the Hill.

Furthermore, the questioner implied, the decision to send young Americans into harm's way -- a decision Ehrlich clearly supported -- may well be the more immoral of the president's behaviors, because having sex with an intern (no matter when the action takes place) simply doesn't register on a Richter scale of moral repercussions.

Had the discussion been allowed to proceed along these lines, Ehrlich may have understood that many who believe the president did not commit perjury or obstruct justice are not automatically locked into the camp that believes the impeachment trial is all about sex. There's a third camp that simply distinguishes leadership issues more finely than sex vs. law.

The discussion never reached this point, but I suspect the questioner and the congressman would have been at odds not only over the importance of juvenile sexual behavior in a national leader but also over the morality of America's foreign and domestic policies; that is, large-scale philosophic differences.

And there is yet another group. Earlier in his talk, Ehrlich suggested, using defense as an example, that President Clinton often seems to side more with Republican ideas than with those of his Democratic supporters.

This comment may have gotten to the heart of a still another camp in the impeachment debate, an overlapping camp whose opposition to the president is rarely stated and had been omitted in the congressman's analysis. This is a group that cares little about sexual morality or the Constitution, a group for whom William Jefferson Clinton is simply not Republican enough.

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Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net