Party that impeached Clinton gets taste of its own medicine
By Gerard Baker
12-10-05
AMERICA’S online satirical newspaper of record, The Onion, captured the political mood rather well with a recent spoof headline: “Topeka Mayor is Now Nation’s Most Senior Unindicted Republican.”
For a party that likes to think of itself as the true protector of the Constitution and laws, the past few months have been a little awkward.
...
Republicans are also reaping that which they have sown. The impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 took judicial oversight of executive behaviour to new levels of eye-watering intensity. Some of the same prosecutorial zeal is now making life extremely difficult at the White House in the
CIA leak case. The political implications of all this are potentially large — as the party’s own success 11 years ago may demonstrate.
In 1994 the Republicans swept to power in Congress on a radical conservative platform under the leadership of Newt Gingrich. The triumph was owed in large part to the aura of sleaze that surrounded the Democrat-controlled Congress at the time. Scandals involving Jim Wright, the Speaker of the House, and Dan Rostenkowski, the Ways and Means Committee chairman (who later served prison time), disgusted voters who adopted a “throw the bums out” approach in the 1994 mid-term elections.
Could that happen to the Republicans next year? Voters are certainly in a sour mood. Iraq, of course, is the main concern, but a sense that Washington’s leaders are sinking deeper into a mire of corruption and lies is making it worse.
It will take a landslide to deprive the party of its House and Senate majorities. But this was the year the land started to shift, imperceptibly at first, then with more momentum as the legal problems piled on top of the political difficulties.
The White House is lying vulnerable in the path of any such landslide.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1918781,00.html
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