Impeach Bill, Volume 2

Last week, Starrcrossedback Saturday thrilled and delighted dozens of you with a handful of my cartoons leading up to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

September, 1998

Just to summarize, certain Republicans eager to overturn the popular election results had been looking for grounds to impeach Clinton from the very day he was sworn into office. When his denial under oath of having had "sexual relations" with a White House intern was proven false by what the mainstream media delicately called "DNA evidence" on her dress, Republicans had their fumus boni iuris.

Q Syndicate, October, 1998

In the U.S., there's always an election coming up; the Republican Congress launched their impeachment proceedings on October 8, with just one month left until midterms.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 10, 1998

Midterms in the sixth year of any presidency tend to go very poorly for the incumbent president's party, but 1998 turned out to be an exception to the rule. Republicans didn't lose enough seats to forfeit their majority in either chamber of Congress, but Democrats gained five seats in the House and held even in both the Senate and gubernatorial races.

in UW-M Post, December 15, 1998

Thus Democrats could complain loudly about Republicans' push to impeach, but they couldn't stop it, even though some Republicans hoped to find some lesser punishment the Congress might agree upon. Members of both parties offered bills to censure Clinton instead, a statement of formal reprimand carrying no enforcement or penalty, but none ever came to the floor for a vote.

Q Syndicate, December, 1998

Instead, the House voted to impeach Clinton on December 19, 1998, so Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Rehnquist went right out and got some celebratory gold stripes stitched onto the sleeves of his judicial robe. (Yeah, Jerry Springer wasn't available.)  The Senate trial lasted from January 7 to February 12, forcing Clinton to deliver his State of the Union address while the impeachment trial was underway. But in the end, not only did Republicans fall short of the two-thirds majority vote to remove Clinton from office, they came up six votes short of even a simple majority.

in UW-M Post, February 2, 1999

The problem Republicans faced was that the electorate knew that Bill Clinton was a philandering, slick-tongued good ol' boy when we elected him, and we didn't care.

Much the same as the Democrats' problem now: a well-distributed minority of the electorate knew that Donald Trump was a corrupt, self-absorbed, lying bully when they elected him. And they're never going to care.

in UW-M Post, February 2, 1999

In presenting Trump's case this week, attorney Jay Sekulow played remarks Chuck Schumer, Zoe Lofgren, Jerry Nadler and other congressional Democrats made last time around, making much the same arguments that Republicans are making this time around. That impeachment Clinton would negate the previous election. That going ahead would mean that every president with a Congressional majority of the other party will be impeached. That the process is political.

Well, yes. The process is political. The founding fathers envisioned it that way; that's why impeachment isn't decided by the courts. (The founding fathers envisioned that senators would be representatives of their respective state legislatures, not of their political party; but we're stuck with what the system has become, and I don't think repealing the 17th Amendment would be much of a help anyway.)

And maybe. The Republicans' defense team has already started their preemptive impeachment trial of possible President-to-Be Joe Biden, prosecuted by the former Florida Attorney General bought off by President Trump, Pam Bondi. If they retake a majority in the House in 2020 or 2022, they're all set to go. Just like they were in 2016 if the election had gone the other way.

But no. Removing a president does not negate the previous election. Bob Dole would not have been inaugurated president in 1999, and Hillary Clinton won't get to move back into the White House this year no matter what. Al Gore might even have been a stronger candidate in 2000 running as the incumbent. By the Trump lawyers' logic, the only U.S. President in history that any Congress was constitutionally allowed to impeach and remove from office was the unelected Gerald Ford — which, ironically, would have elevated a Democrat to the presidency.

Impeach Bill, Volume 1

StarrChamberBack Saturday offers you a break from the impeachment trial of Donald Joffrey Trump. I've already dealt with the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, and the cartoons I drew about the Nixon impeachment hearings were lost decades ago; so here's the first installment of a two-part reverie on the impeachment of William Jismerson Clinton.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, February 13, 1997

To begin at the beginning: Kenneth Starr had been appointed Independent Counsel by the District of Columbia Circuit Court to continue predecessor Robert Fiske's investigation into the purported "Whitewater Scandal." Bill and Hillary Clinton were accused of some skulduggery in a realty deal back in Arkansas in which they had ended up losing money anyway. While the Fiske-Starr investigation turned up no crime with which either Clinton could be charged, the Independent Counsel's investigation branched out into several unrelated investigations, including the suicide of Vince Foster, the firing of some staffers in the White House Travel office, and a lawsuit by Paula Jones charging Bill Clinton with sexual harassment when he was Governor of Arkansas.

in the UW-M Post, February 12, 1998

In spite of voluminous leaks from Starr's office, most of the investigations went nowhere. The Jones investigation, however, inspired Pentagon employee Linda Tripp to record her phone calls with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, about the intern's affair with the President, and to turn those tapes over to Starr's office. When Starr's office deposed President Clinton over that affair, Clinton denied under oath ever having had "sexual relations" with Lewinsky.

in UW-M Post, April 23, 1998

Clinton had emphatically made that same claim in a televised speech in January, unaware that Tripp had convinced Lewinsky not to dry-clean a navy blue dress stained with presidential spooge, but to turn it over to Starr's office instead.

Q Syndicate, August, 1998

I had begun drawing cartoons for Q Syndicate the year before this, and for two individual LGBTQ newspapers before that. My cartoons for the national LGBTQ media touched on aspects of news stories that might have been overlooked by the mainstream media.

Q Syndicate, September 1998

The Trump impeachment trial may well be over before next Saturday, but I'll be back with the rest of the Clinton impeachment story anyway. See you then!