DAMN REPUBLICANS!
SELLOUT: THE INSIDE STORY OF PRESIDENT CLINTON'S IMPEACHMENT
By David P. Schippers

David P. Schippers is an angry and disappointed man. That is the clear message one takes away from reading Sellout, his memoir of President Clinton's impeachment by the House of Representatives in 1998. It is an event that already feels like ancient history, although it took place only yesterday.

"When the time came to name this book, one word came immediately to mind," Schippers writes in his introduction. "'Sellout. The Republican leadership in the Senate and House sold out the House Managers and our investigation."

Why would they do such a thing?

This is the mystery at the heart of this passionate book, one which has a solution, but which lies buried in the details. For some reason, Schippers never spells out for the reader exactly what motivated the Republican leadership to keep President Clinton in the White House.

However, the solution is not so cryptic that Schippers' answer cannot be decoded, although it is extremely embarrassing for Republicans who might be a target audience for a book bearing the Regnery imprint.

Many of Schippers' criticisms of President Clinton and his partisan supporters are nothing new, which lulls the reader into a false sense of familiarity. One startling exception is Schippers' interpretation that President Clinton's bombing of Iraq on the day the House voted to impeach him was the tipping point -- that this action was the fact that persuaded Congress to vote to impeach the President.

In this view, President Clinton impeached himself by bombing Saddam Hussein, therefore demonstrating an abuse of Presidential power in ways that could not be ignored.

But on other matters Schippers sheds little new light. This is not exactly Schippers' fault, because due to an agreement with Congress, the evidence used in impeachment has been placed under seal for 50 years. Yet, how and why this agreement to hide remaining evidence from the American public came to be, is not explained.

Instead of telling all, Schippers quotes from hearing documents and his own public presentations. Unfortunately, too much of the heart of the book consists of such reprints, featuring material better suited to an appendix. While plowing through small-print transcripts, the reader cries out for Schippers' orginal, passionate, and engaging interpretation. When he is allowed by his editors to be himself, he is an honest and forthright voice in the wilderness.

But when he has to carry water for Republicans, his prose has a distracted quality. For example, there is a perplexing and marginally relevant chapter highlighting political manipulation of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, mildly embarrassing to Vice President Al Gore, who otherwise comes off as the Invisible Man of the Clinton scandals. This detour takes one away from the Sellout of the title.

It is not his critique of Democrats, but Schippers' passionate and whithering scorn for the Grand Old Party, especially his denunciations of Republican Senate Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi and House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich which makes Sellout important and worthwhile reading. While he is complimentary to individual Republicans, especially Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, who hired him, it is obvious that Schippers is angry and disappointed not so much with the Democrats -- though he chides them pro forma for standing behind the President in a partisan bloc, while ignoring evidence of "high crimes and misdemeanors" including perjury, suborning perjury, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice -- as at the Republican Party. (In fact, Schippers is effusively complimentary to Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, recounting his assertion to Congressmen Henry Hyde and James Rogan that the Connecticut Yankee was at one point "the best friend we had...")

Republicans, not Democrats, are to blame for the embarrasing impeachment fiasco, according to Schippers. If President Clinton got away with a crime spree, Trent Lott drove the getaway car, while Newt Gingrich served as lookout. That is the verdict of Sellout.

Schippers writes, "With friends like these Republicans, we didn't need enemies." And if the House's own counsel was appalled and horrified by the failure of the Republican leadership, how could they possibly enjoy the confidence of the American people necessary to convict a sitting President, no matter how guilty?

And Schippers is not reacting to media "spin" but to the evidence of his own inside Washington experience, when he implies that Republicans were the reason that Al Gore did not become President in 1998. Conviction would have meant President Gore. Schippers indicates that President Gore would have been in a good position to run for re-election in 2000. Indeed, the Democrats might have benefitted from a clean slate.

And, Schippers concludes somewhat indirectly, with the implications never quite fully spelled-out, Republican leaders feared an incumbent Gore more than an incumbent Clinton. Therefore, Lott and Gingrich had no intention of allowing Gore to run with all the benefits of the office. Since Republicans were determined to keep Gore out of the White House, they were obliged to keep Clinton in. And to keep Clinton in, they had to close their eyes to the case Schippers had carefully put together proving multiple felonies committed by the Commander-in-Chief.

Incredibly, if Schippers is right -- and he is most persuasive -- the Republican goal during the Senate impeachment trial was not to convict President Clinton, but to exonerate him. This aim was based on a political calculation that Clinton would be weakened and Gore would be tarnished sufficiently by association to make his election difficult.

So, in order to keep to the Republican game plan for the 2000 election, President Clinton would be maintained in office, bruised but not beaten, shaken but not stirred. The merits of the legal case against him would be surrended to a political calculation that keeping Clinton in office helped Republicans.

According to Schippers, that is precisely what took place at the Senate trial.

He baldly declares that not a single Senator looked at the evidence assembled by the House managers prior to voting on President Clinton's guilt or innocence. How does he know? Well, it turns out that Schippers kept the sign-in sheets for the evidence files. According to Schippers this, and the fact that Trent Lott reportedly said he knew what the the final vote would be before the trial, demonstrates that the impeachment trial was "rigged" in advance.

That such a political strategy would discredit the Republicans rather than the Democrats, because it was manifestly stupid and counterproductive, as well as immoral and conducive to an undermining of respect for law, apparently only occurred to lifelong Democrats like Schippers.

A former Mob prosecutor, criminal lawyer, and Democrat who twice voted for President Clinton-- his cousin was the Cook County Chairman of the Democratic Party -- Schippers may have written a book that confirms the wisdom of his early childhood training.

For, as he tells his readers early on, he was taught as a boy never to say the word "Republican" without the prefix "Damn."