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Editorial: Give the nation a grand senate trial
We are deflowered and disabused. We are past plays to keep us believing - believing in our president, believing in our "bipartisan process," believing even that America's opinion, as weighed and measured by polls, matter anymore in certain sectors of this Washington circus of partisanship raging out of control. We just want a peoples' vindication. And we believe a Senate trial will supply just that. All through this wild ride where no one did what the people wanted - not the president, nor the House who voted to impeach him- we were spectators watching what we did not endorse. Now finally we can endorse something. The Senate trial. Ostensibly, the Senate will weigh whether the president's perjury meets the Constitutional criterion for impeachment. We, like most Americans, know better. How can the trial meet such a weighty purpose when it is tried in the soundbite court of the media? So let the senators pretend - or in some cases even believe - to be deliberating over weighty legal semantics rather than how to navigate through the political maelstrom that has seized our Capitol. Let the newspapers be filled with their crossfire incongruously shot before the House prosecutors even begin opening arguments tomorrow. America will be watching with the same hunger a sports fan watches a game whose outcome he already knows. For we know the outcome. All show aside, the Republicans don't have the votes in the senate for impeachment. Perhaps the Senate is more attuned to the will of the people. Perhaps the composition is more representative. Or perhaps, simply, the fever that seized the House of Representatives skirted the Senate. Whichever way, we can rest assured that Clinton, like Andrew Johnson before him, will not be booted out of office. And that will be our vindication. After being forced to watch our government being conducted contrary to our concerns, we certainly deserve to watch a play-by-play of our vindication. So forego the futile - and rather laughable - motions to quash a Senate trial, President Clinton's counsels. Give us a denouement, a courtroom climax. Only make the trial speedy. Not because of the Democrats' concern that their bespattered president not be further and lingeringly drawn through the mire. Nor even because we wish to oppose the Republicans, who, clearly unable to stop in mid-frenzy, wish to prolong the frenzy. But simply because we want to finally see a legislative body we elected voting in deference to our concerns. And, perhaps, we'd like partisan Republicans to see the outcome and the aftermath sooner, so sooner can they begin to squirm in contemplation of very dim election prospects in 2000.
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