Can we add, "For want of a horse, the White House was lost"? At least, we might infer as much from a column by D.S. and R.E. Hinerfeld in the Honolulu Advertiser for Oct. 11, 1999 (p.B2). They say that the Supreme Court's ruling that "the lower court was wrong to postpone the Jones trial until Bill Clinton left office... invited our nation's present debacle". "The federal government is nearly paralyzed," they continue, "the media are obsessed, the populace is disgusted, the nation ridiculed and the Jones case has yet to go to trial." The Court supported its decision with the claim that the Jones case appeared "highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of the [president's] time.." Yet it should not have taken an Archimedes to see that a precariously balanced scheme of governance based on the separation-of-powers principle could, indeed, be unsettled by a very small lever.

Surely the Hinerfelds were right, but the Supreme Court's rejection of the claim that the Jones case would "impose an unacceptable burden on the president's time and energy, and thereby impair the effective performance of his office" was only one link in a long chain of events, any one of which might have stopped the tragic process unfolding before our eyes. Consider that if Paula Jones had not decided, years after the event, to charge the president, the process would never have started. Had the anti-Clinton groups that funded her efforts not supported her, the process could not have gone forward. Had Linda Tripp not taped Monica Lawinski, or had Kenneth Starr not encouraged her to trap her friend, history could have been quite different.

The Republicans in Congress now say the impeachment question has nothing to do with a sex scandal, but everything to do with perjury and obstruction of justice. Yet if President Clinton had not been called as a witness in the Jones trial where he sought to conceal his pattern of private misbehavior, he would never have had a motive for committing perjury. As recent reports confirm, many American presidents have not been faithful husbands -- the Hinerfeld's mention Harding, Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson and add that these "are just the documented cases." They were never charged, however, and hence they never had to lie under oath. This does not excuse their conduct, but it does show that the cause of the alleged perjury was the prosecutor's decision to put the president on the witness stand.

However, these are all short-run considerations. There are deeper causes that go back to the founding fathers, and hence the quotation from Benjamin Franklin that heads this note. Their eighteenth century decision to establish a regime based on the "separation-of-powers" meant that the president is entitled to remain in office for a fixed term. All the industrialized democracies whose constitutional systems evolved during the nineteenth century gave a majority in parliament the right to oust a minority government and substitute one of their own members as the next political leader.

Recognizing that Congress might need to terminate a dangerous president's term prematurely, however, the founders stipulated a process of impeachment that is not based on policy differences but on personal misconduct. This gives an opposition majority in Congress no option but to look for faults in the conduct of any president they would like to evict from office. They recently added a powerful tool, the independent prosecutor, who can with unlimited resources and an expanding mandate search for any flaws in the president's character that might render him impeachable. Had Clinton vetoed the law authorizing this wayward institution, as his Republican predecessor had recommended, another link in the chain of causes would have been broken.

The impeachment process has been rarely used -- for historical reasons we need not explore here -- but clearly the increasingly important role of American presidents as industrialization and globalization have raised the stakes of executive leadership (not only in America but throughout the world), questions about the president's character and leadership capacity have become increasingly salient. They have not led, however, to genuine impeachment efforts except in the case of Richard Nixon when members of his own party turned against him, making possible the two-thirds majority in the Senate required to impeach a president. So far, at least, enough Democrats oppose impeachment to make such a majority almost impossible.

This creates another link in the chain -- it frees the Republican majority in the House to use the impeachment process to further its political goals, to prolong that process indefinitely, and to expand its scope so that, during the coming two years, various unspecified new charges can be brought. If, after all that, they do vote articles of impeachment, they know the Senate will save them from the risk of bringing Al Gore to the presidency. They clearly do not want him in the White House since, as the probable next Democratic candidate for president, that would make him more difficult to defeat. The decision to hold open-ended hearings on impeachment without determining the criteria they would use to justify classing conduct as a "high crime or misdemeanor" is sure to antagonize many Democrats in Congress. On its face, it seems irrational or unreasonable. However, since their hidden agenda is not to impeach the president but to discredit his party and to win more votes for Republican candidates, this behavior is easily explained -- it might even be called "rational."

The media strive to appear objective in reporting the controversy but they add spins that intensify the impeachment angers. Consider that while a torrent of publicity on this process continues, almost nothing is heard of behaviors that might similarly discredit leading Republicans, like Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott. According to a recent story in the Cleveland Plaindealer (reproduced in the Honolulu Advertiser -- date?), Congress authorized a billion dollar contract to purchase new high tech planes for the Air Force. However, according to Air Force General Michael Ryan(?) during a recent Congressional session, the planes were not needed and they are unwanted. The decision was then made to "park" the craft, until needed. Just incidentally, the planes were manufactured in Speaker Gingrich's district and parked in Mississippi, Senator Lott's constituency. So far as I can tell, the media have ignored this story. When the Republican leaders in Congress can use "pork" to help them get re-elected at a billion dollar cost to the American taxpayers and the media ignore the story while devoting their attention endlessly to a president's sexual misconduct and cover-up lies, may we not include the media as at least an accessory cause of the process?

But what are its consequences? The Hinerfelds (quoted above) conclude that the Supreme Court's decision has "created a disaster for the American people." More broadly, is the weakening of the American presidency not a disaster for the whole world -- or at least, for all those who count on American help in the face of numerous disasters? Yet the impeachment process is not the only reason for a weakened presidency. I see it as the third strike in a game that has already brought two strikes against the American executive power. All three strikes have a constitutional character.

The first strike involves the ceiling imposed by the 22^nd Amendment in 1951 which limits presidents to two terms, thereby creating a lame duck presidency during the latter part of any president's second term. Ambitious members of the president's party begin to switch their allegiance to potential candidates for the next term. They may even cultivate rivals in the coming primaries when their rhetoric distances them from the president by claims they will not have his faults. Inescapably, a lame duck in the White House is seriously handicapped as a national leader.

The second strike is both political and constitutional. It is political insofar as the effectiveness of any president confronted by an opposition majority in Congress is seriously damaged -- many of his most important policy initiatives are blocked. However, this fact is predicated on the constitutional separation of powers which establishes the executive power outside the authority of the legislature, a limitation no other industrialized democracy permits.

Of course, this feature of the American constitution not only stifles presidential initiatives but drives the impeachment process. Paradoxically, one of the arguments offered by emulators of the American system as well as by most American political scientists and lawyers, is that the presidentialist system provides greater stability and more effective leadership than parliamentarism. They point to frequent cabinet crises in some parliamentary regimes -- especially Italy -- where the proliferation of extremist parties and the weakening of moderate forces has prevailed.

This is abnormal under parliamentary conditions just as the survival of American democracy is exceptional for separation-of-powers regimes: consider that ten presidentialist regimes in Latin America have had at least a dozen new constitutions since they were established, and all separation-of-powers regimes except the United States have experienced serious breakdowns and periods of authoritarian rule. To show that this is not just a Latin condition, consider the fate of post-communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet region.

According to Jerzy Wiatr, an astute Polish sociologist and politician with an international reputation, all of the regimes which adopted American-style presidentialist systems have suffered from violence and breakdowns, whereas those that chose parliamentary systems have been far more successful. His article, "Parliamentarism vs. Presidentialism: Old Debate and New Experiences of Post-communist States" will soon be published at UCLA in the journal, Communist and Post-communist Studies. (Copies of the draft may be obtained from the author)

As a case in point, consider the economic success of parliamentary Poland where laws supporting new start-up enterprises contrast with the startling breakdown of the Russian economy. Despite President Boris Yeltsin's efforts to implement similar policies, the Russian Duma was able to block them on behalf of powerful oligarchs whose ownership of former state enterprises has proved highly inefficient and costly to the state. Even today, as Yeltsin stumbles, the Duma can block but not replace him, and the world helplessly confronts a disaster of mounting proportions.

As for the United States, at a time when American leadership in an increasingly anarchic world is desperately needed, we have to depend on a constitutional system that seriously undermines the capacity of our presidents to provide effective leadership. Is it not time for us to notice this tragic anomaly and start discussing its implications? I believe it is possible to take steps to strengthen the executive power in America without seeking any constitutional amendments -- but only if we recognize that the serious impediments to his leadership faced by William Jefferson Clinton will surely hamper future American presidents as well. The time to think and talk about this is now before it is too late and we fall into a catastrophic decline.

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Updated: 29 October 1998