Dump Dick Gephardt

House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D.-Mo.) deserves to be dumped from Congress if only for his behavior in the Clinton impeachment scandal.

Dec. 19, 1998, is a day that will live in infamy in the history of our Republic.

That morning, for the third day in a row, President Clinton risked the lives of U.S. pilots by sending them to bomb dubious targets in Iraq-thus cynically abusing the constitutional powerof Commander in Chiefto cast a shadow over the only presidential impeachment vote of the 20th Century.

As the anti-aircraft fire rose up over Baghdad, Dick Gephardt went to the floor of the House of Representatives to try to block the impeachment vote through parliamentary maneuvers. In keeping with the administration's strategy, Gephardt wanted the House to officially "censure" the President for his personal indiscretions with a 21-year-old intern, rather than impeach him for the methodical perjury and carefully orchestrated obstruction of justice he perpetrated against a federal court and grand jury.

When the parliamentary maneuvering failed, Gephardt gave a pompous speech on the House floor accusing the Republicans and, by implication, the handful of couragenus Democrats who joined them, of pursuing "the politics of personal destruction."

Pliant Partisan Prop

What Gephardt, Clinton and the vast majority of congressional Democrats were seeking to destroy that day was not some target in Iraq, but the rule of law in the United States itself They knew-4heir cynical censure motion betrayed them-that Clinton was guilty of the crimes of which he stood accused.

Mary McGrory, the archliberal columnist for the Washington Post, reveled in the scene she witnessed on the House floor following Gephardt's sanctimonious speech. "When he finished," she wrote, "the Democrats went crazy. They jammed the aisles as they struggled to come close enough to embrace him. Gephardt was cheered and hugged and kissed." Later, after the House approved the articles of impeachment indicting Clinton, Gephardt led a bus full of Democrats down to the White House to attend a Clinton rally on the South Lawn. Here the House minority leader played the role of cheerleader in chief. "Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, First Lady Hillary Clinton," he said, "we've just witnessed a partisan vote that was a disgrace to our country and our Constitution."

When Clinton finished his own speech moments later, the first person he hugged was Dick Gephardt.

A few hours after that, Clinton abruptly announced he was suspending the bombing of Iraq that he had abruptly initiated only 70 hours before.

Gephardt's most memorable act in this Congress, then, was to serve as a pliant and reliable partisan prop as the President of the United States wagged the dog in Iraq.

In fairness, however, it took Gephardt many years and many Congresses to hone and develop the lack of integrity that marks his most recent performances.

He started his political career positioned to the right of what now has become the philosophical center of the Republican Party. Though his mother was a Democrat, he was raised by a conservative Republican father. "His whole family was Republican," Gephardt's mother once told a reporter about her husband. "When he found that both boys [Dick and his brother Don] were going to be Democrats, he buried his head in his hands and said it was a terrible thing."

Nonetheless, Gephardt rose to prominence in Missouri politics pushing a socially conservative agenda.' He fought to close adult bookstores and allow tuition tax credits for children attending religious schools, and favored constitutional amendments to permit prayer in public schools and ban court-ordered busing.

In 1976, when he first ran for Congress, he printed an advertisement in a local newspaper-headlined "A Pro-Life Promise"pledging to work for a constitutional amendment to prohibit abortion. After he was elected, his first speech on the House floor was in favor of the amendment.

But Gephardt was not strictly a Pat Robertson-style social conservative. He was also an economic conservative.

In the late 1970s, he joined then-Rep. David Stockman (the Michigan Republican who later became President Reagan's Office of Management and Budget director) in thwarting a plan by President Carter to impose federal cost controls on hospitals. He then co-sponsored with Stockman a bill that would have deregulated the health-insurance industry, a plan, which if enacted, might have thwarted the momenturn of the dreaded health maintenance organizations that now dominate the health-care industry.

In that pre-Reagan era, Gephardt also opposed the creation of the Department of Education, and resisted raising the minimum wage.

After Reagan's election, he used his position on the House Ways and Means Committee to help shepherd through Reagan's landmark 1981 tax cuts. And when Reagan defeated Walter Mondale in a 49-state landslide in 1984, Gephardt became founding chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, with the express aim of moving his party rightward. But then ambition trumped principle.