Should he stay … or should he go?

What, first of all, are we to impeach Bill Clinton for? Granted, no President in living memory, not even Nixon, has run a longer gauntlet of scandal accusations: Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, Hillary's Cattle Futures, Asiagate I (the donors), and Asiagate II (the rockets), not to mention various cover-up scandals, from the Resolution Trust Corporation tip off to the alleged Hubbell hush money. But these scandals, even taken together, haven't met the threshold for removing a President. It is the Monica Lewinsky allegations--1) that the President committed adultery with a White House intern, 2) that he lied about this adultery under oath, 3) that he sought to influence the testimony of others about it, and 4) that he has sought to obstruct the work of the independent counsel--that now form the core of the case for impeachment.

What flimsy grounds for depriving a democracy of the President it elected! The adultery and the lying, if proved, are basically the same offense. The very act of adultery is a lie. I'll wager the President never returned to the White! House living quarters after any Lewinsky incident to say, "Honey, you'll never believe what happened today at work..."

But there is this distinction between adultery and the verbal lying that follows it: Strictly speaking, there's only one wronged party in adultery. (In this case, she doesn't favor impeachment.) Lying under oath, by contrast, erodes the justice system for all of us. Unfortunately for impeachment advocates, the justice that is being sicked on Bill Clinton is justice at its least legitimate. Its linchpin is the abusive independent-counsel law. Republicans accurately diagnosed the problems with that law during the Iran-Contra charade, but it's a diagnosis they've conveniently forgotten since. Just as in Iran-Contra, none of today's threatened indictments involve conduct anterior to the investigation-all involve failure to cooperate with the investigation itself.

The independent counsel taints Congress's very impeachment power. Notice the late-June remarks of House Majority Leader Dick Armey: "Judge Starr is investigating this matter at the request of the Attorney General. We ought to all be patient, to sit and wait and see what he does and react to his report when it comes. It isn't the Members of Congress that are talking about that."

Shouldn't it be? Congress's impeachment role arises from its constitutional responsibility for oversight of the Executive Branch. Does Armey believe Congress has this responsibility or not? Here, he's saying that either a) Congress is recusing itself from its oversight responsibility by lobbing it to Starr, or b) in a time of divided government, the independent counsel is little more than the harassment arm of the Legislative Branch.

That Clinton told his alleged lies in a sexual-harassment case undermines the investigation's legitimacy even further. Republican activists correctly considered this body of law a feminist fraud when it was wielded (with no evidence whatsoever) against Clarence Thomas in 1991. If there's one thing less consonant with Republican principles than impeachment based on a sexual-harassment suit, it's impeachment based on a sexual-harassment suit that has, like Paula Jones's, been dismissed.

Of course, Democrats have grotesquely abused both the independent-counsel law and sexual-harassment law. It is asking a lot to expect Republicans to forgo such weapons themselves. Still, the responsible thing for a congressional majority to do with constitutional chicanery is not to bend it to one's own ends but to abolish it, and hope the public has the good judgment to reward a party that does so. If the public lacks that good judgment, we have a bigger problem on our hands than a goatish Chief Executive.

Turning our attention from the trees that are Mr. Clinton's peccadilloes to the forest that is the American system of government, we see the direct clash of two important principles. The first is that no person should be above the law.

The second is that the American people have the right to choose their own President. This is the heart and soul of our democracy, a principle that one monkeys with at the nation's peril. It therefore takes precedence over the first principle, except under one circumstance: when someone's placing himself above the law threatens the Constitution or the national security.

President Clinton's satyriasis is tawdry, his scramble to cover it up devious. But does. either meet this criterion of constitutional or national peril? Not even close.

Mr. Caldwell is a senior writer for The Weekly Standard.

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