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One of the more piquant passages in the interview that Mark Warren and I did with former President Bill Clinton, which appears in this month's production of Esquire: The Magazine is this part right at the top where Clinton talks about a change of heart experienced by a former GOP congresscritter named Bob Inglis, who lost in a primary in 2010 because he said disrespectful things about Glenn Beck but who, in the giddy years of the late 1990's, wielded his pitchfork most enthusiastically in the cause of impeaching Clinton, an effort for which he recently apologized, according to the former president, who nonetheless told us:
I had a fascinating meeting with Bob Inglis the other day. Bob Inglis was an extremely conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina. He was a three-term-pledge guy in the nineties.... So he came to me and he said, "I just want you to know, when you got elected, I hated you. And I asked to be on the Judiciary Committee in 1993, because a bunch of us had already made up our minds that no matter what you did or didn't do, we were going to find some way to impeach you. We hated you. You had no right to be president."
This has been a consistent something-more-than-a-rumor ever since Bill Clinton took office - that the Republicans wanted him removed from the first day he took office, and that they were not waiting for a crime so much as they were waiting for the moment when they had the votes to do it. (That this is a monumental act of contempt for the people who elected him their president should not concern us here, because it apparently never concerned the Republicans.) At this point, of course, impeachment was still considered by the country at large to be a constitutional artifact, as it had been even at the beginning of the country. Thomas Jefferson was both wary of the political uses to which it could be put, and also prone to ridiculing the whole notion. In 1798, in a letter to James Madison, Jefferson called it "the most formidable weapon for the purpose of dominant faction that ever was contrived." Twenty-two years later, in another letter, this one to Thomas Ritchie, he famously dismissed it as a "scarecrow."
