Why Impeachment Is Different This Time Around

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The chair recognizes Mr.

Manager Shabbat.

Thank you.

I'm Steve Shabbat, and I represent the 1st District of Ohio, which is Cincinnati.

This week, we will likely finally conclude this trial.

Has it been difficult?

Yes.

Would we all have preferred that none of this ever happened?

Of course.

But the President has put our nation through a terrible ordeal, and it has been our duty to pursue this case to its conclusion.

That's Congressman Steve Steve Shabbat in February 1999.

He's standing before the Senate making the House Republicans' case in the impeachment trial of President Clinton.

As a lawyer and a member of the House Judiciary Committee, Shabbat had been selected, along with 12 of his colleagues, to be what are called impeachment managers.

Basically, the House prosecutors for the Senate trial.

Shabbat came of age during Watergate.

He tried President Clinton in the 1990s.

And now, as one of only two Clinton impeachment managers still in the House, he's in a unique position to reflect on the third impeachment proceeding in his lifetime.

I'm Isaac Dover.

This week on Radio Atlantic, I sat down with Congressman Shabbat in his office on Capitol Hill.

On Wednesday, the day before we spoke, the House Judiciary Committee opened debate on two articles of impeachment against President Trump.

21 years ago to the day that same committee approved articles of impeachment against President Clinton.

We know how that story ended, and everyone watching this process has a good idea how this story will likely end.

The House will impeach.

almost Almost certainly the Senate will acquit, and eventually the country will vote.

But this conversation was a window into what it looks like from the inside of the process and with a guy who literally had to run out at the end of our interview to go right to the second day of hearings on the articles of impeachment.

Take a listen.

So, Congressman, I think that the

thing for a lot of people is that impeachment is such a big thing, such a crazy abstract thing.

You have been through it now for your second time, but I want to go back to that first time.

And if you can remember what it was the day that you voted to impeach Bill Clinton, what was that day like?

Well, being on the Judiciary Committee, you actually have a couple of opportunities to vote

first in committee, which

we'll be doing today in the Judiciary Committee if everything goes according to schedule.

And then next week

in the full House.

So that happened back then.

We voted in Judiciary Committee and then in the full House.

Obviously in the full House, the magnitude of it is elevated.

You are

aware of the sense of a history.

It was about 25 years prior to that vote that I actually watched on television when I was in college another impeachment, and that was Richard Nixon, who I had voted for in the 1972 election.

And so,

you know, you certainly understand

in a historical context how important it is and what it means to our country.

And the fact that you don't particularly want to be there and don't want to be impeaching the president under any circumstances.

But,

you know, in our history, it sometimes happens.

And you didn't, of course, just cast a vote.

You were an impeachment manager when it went to the Senate.

Right.

They picked 13 members

of the House to be the prosecutors of the case out of 435, and I was one of the 13.

How did they pick you?

I can't say for sure.

Henry Hyde was the leader of our group.

He was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

All of us were on the Judiciary Committee.

They picked about half of the Republicans on the committee.

But did you want to do it?

I was willing to do it and said yes.

So I don't know that I necessarily wanted to do it, but it's,

you know, it happened 20-some years ago.

I mean, it seems like you don't want to be in an impeachment process, even if you, as in that case, believed in the charges

and believed that the president had violated his oath of office.

But

you still want to be part of the process to do it the right way.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so those two things are...

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

And one of my concerns, especially this time around, is the fact that I think

I'm afraid that the Democrats this time have lowered the bar on what constitutes an impeachable offense.

At this point, these are not actually crimes.

And they're supposed to be, you know, treason, bribery, high crimes, and misdemeanors.

And, you know, President Clinton had put his hand on the Bible and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

And then he lied.

You know, it was perjury.

I'm concerned that in the first 200 or so years of our history, we only had one impeachment, Andrew Johnson, 200 years.

And now in the last, in fact, less than 50 years, we're seeing our third one today in judiciary and next week on the floor.

So I think they're becoming too routine.

I think they're too divisive for the country unless they're really necessary.

And this one I think is not really necessary.

I think this one is far too much just about politics and the next election.

I mean the Democrats, not all, but a lot of them have wanted to impeach this president since the day he was inaugurated.

You know, we had one member, a Democrat from Texas, who said that

they needed to impeach him because otherwise he's going to get reelected.

And that's not why we're supposed to impeach presidents or judges or anybody else.

And it should be said, you're a Republican.

You were an impeachment manager in the Clinton impeachment.

You mentioned that you watched the Nixon impeachment almost happen.

We didn't get quite to impeaching Nixon.

He was a Republican.

But that was one that at the time you

supported, essentially, right?

You're talking about Nixon.

Nixon?

Yeah, yeah.

And as a matter of fact,

this may come as a surprise to some folks, but,

and I had voted for Nixon in 72.

That's the first president I that I voted for four years later I voted for Jimmy Carter

a Democrat

principally because I thought it was wrong

that Gerald Ford had pardoned Richard Nixon you know I just thought there must have been some kind of deal there and and that I just didn't like that at all and so I voted for Jimmy Carter now

I'll also acknowledge that's the last Democrat that I voted for was that the first Democrat that you voted for

well no I'd probably although that was like my second election, you know, because

my literally first election was

in 1972, and that was for Nixon.

So, so anyway, but yeah, I'm a representative.

Any lower office that you voted for a Democrat for?

Has it been Republicans all through?

Yeah, even Jimmy Carter.

Even nowadays, I've voted for a few Democrats, local Democrats, who I respect and think they're doing a good job and that sort of thing.

So, yeah, I've voted for a few.

It is a minority.

It is a minority, but I'm sorry.

Don't tell the county chairs back home.

Yeah.

This process, though, when you go through it, is there a way

to really prepare for the process of being a House manager?

What do you do then?

Is it just a lot of days going through legal books and prepping the arguments?

Or is it not like a trial in the traditional sense, even though it is a trial in the Senate?

Yeah,

there are similarities and differences relative to a trial and the preparation therefore.

I practiced law for almost two decades before I got here to Congress.

And obviously when you have a trial, you prepare and you want to make sure you're representing your client well.

Over there, you know, the jury is 100 senators.

And the judge in that case is the Chief Justice of the U.S.

Supreme Court at that time, Rehnquist.

And so, and you're in the Senate chamber, you know, where lots of important things have happened through our nation's history.

I would argue more important things happened in the House, House, but you know, that's

as a longtime member of the House, that is what you would argue.

That's right.

But you do prepare for these things, and

you know that the eyes of your constituents in your district, as well as the nation, even the world, when something like that happens, are on you, so you don't want to screw it up.

And so I did my best to prepare, and

ultimately, we were unable to persuade two-thirds of the Senate that the president should be removed from office, and he was acquitted.

The closest vote was 50-50.

but obviously and that kind of sounds like it was very close but it takes two-thirds so it wasn't that close.

And Rehnquist had had for that occasion he added the stripes to his robe right which then became part of it going forward.

That's right.

Was there any work that you had done legally that came in handy when you got to time when it came time for impeachment?

All of it does to some degree.

Any case that you worked on, anything?

Not particularly.

Nothing really that close to impeaching a president and having the Supreme Court Chief Justice be the trial judge.

You know,

I was a sole practitioner, which means you're the only person running your firm.

And that's what I did for about 16 years before I got here.

And I handled all kinds of stuff from divorces to wills and probate, personal injury cases, to criminal cases, and traffic cases, and you name it.

But never impeachments.

So that was a first.

There aren't a lot of traffic courts that deal with high crimes and misdemeanors, of course, but we'll be back with more with Congressman Steve Shabbat in a moment.

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You have talked about the Democrats making a political mistake here

and letting the politics get in front of this.

The idea that you have put out there is that this is not going to stand in the way of the president's reelection, that he will be acquitted by the Senate, which I think most people expect at this point.

And you say he'll be re-elected then, that it'll, if anything, be good for his politics and maybe just be a wash.

Do you,

thinking back,

see what happened in the Clinton impeachment as, again, separating the legal part of it as politically a bad idea for Republicans?

Well, you know, you have to

this happened,

you know, most of the

lead-up to the impeachment was prior to the 1998 election.

Right.

And you had a Democratic president, and so the opposite party is expected to pick up seats, which would have been Republicans.

Instead of picking up seats, we actually lost five or six seats.

And as a result of that, Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House, stepped down, and

so there was a lot of

finger-pointing about, well, we were so out front on this that it hurt us.

Now,

it was after the election that we moved forward with it, and then it was early next year, in January,

that we actually had the Senate trial, et cetera.

I don't know if you realize, but

yesterday, the day before we're sitting here recording, was 21 years ago to the day of when the Judiciary Committee, which you were on then, on now, voted on the

articles of impeachment.

Somebody brought that to my attention yesterday or recently, and yeah, it's pretty amazing when you think about these things.

But you were saying that

there were those losses, right, that were

during the scope of impeachment, even though the actual process went through after the election.

And you think that that was because of what happened?

Well, I think ultimately that's probably what happened.

I think the public, a couple of things happened.

I think the public got sick of this, and the majority in the public felt that the president, whereas he'd done some bad things, it probably didn't merit impeachment.

That was what...

the majority felt ultimately.

So I think the Democrats did benefit politically, at least in that election.

Now, George Bush was elected two years later president,

and Al Gore had had a real challenge of how close does he get to Bill Clinton?

Does he distance himself from him?

He kind of distanced himself and then left him.

Well, I mean, there was the argument that by picking Joe Lieberman as his running mate, he was, because Lieberman had been so out front against Clinton that that was a pretty good signal to voters where he wanted them.

to see him about Clinton.

Yeah, so it's hard to know exactly what impact it had on the next presidential election, but I think it's safe to say it probably did benefit to some degree the Democrats in thinking that Republicans had overreached.

I don't think we did, but that's what I think a majority in the public thought.

And I think it's reasonable to assume that this time around

we may see somewhat that same dynamic.

I don't think, especially by the time the election rolls around, that most people are going to think

that we really should have gone through this mess, that there are so many other things that we should have been focused on, things like the opioid addiction, the fact that about 68,000 of our fellow Americans lost their lives last year due to overdoses, and Congress hasn't done much in this Congress to address that.

The fact that we got a $22 trillion debt hanging over our head and the Judiciary Committee,

and I've introduced a balanced budget amendment again, but I'm not going to get any support from the Democrats for that and not enough Republican support, quite frankly.

So we're not going to get anything done on that.

Our infrastructure, now that's not the Judiciary Committee, but Congress overall.

Congress overall.

Yeah.

You know, our bridges and highways are crumbling, yet we haven't been able to pass an infrastructure bill, and that ought to be bipartisan.

Now, we are going to get one thing, it looks like, you know, it looks like USMCA replacing NAFTA is going to happen.

Is it hard to think, like

a lot of people have picked up on this, that the same moment, in fact, the same day that Nancy Pelosi announced that the House is going to move forward with impeachment, she also announced that the USMCA trade deal was going to move forward.

To have these two things

go against each other.

Yeah, it is.

The irony is, I think, and USMCA, I would argue, is very good.

We ought to pass it.

It's good for the country, good for jobs, etc.

But I do think that to some degree, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats did not want the president to get credit for this.

And so they were kind of holding back, even though we had really put the

worker safety things in that they wanted, the environmental things got at it.

There were a lot of things that got added.

But they wouldn't move forward.

Now that they're moving forward with impeachment,

I do think that they do want to say, hey, we are able to walk and chew gum.

We're able to impeach a president and actually pass a trade deal almost at the same time.

Is it hard because you guys are at each other's throats over impeachment and now you're finding something to work together on here?

It's harder.

It's not impossible, you know, to get things done, but it is harder when you're yelling at each other

and fighting about impeachment.

But again, it's possible to get things done, and this is maybe one example.

But we could get a lot more done if we weren't

heading down this trail of impeachment.

The clock buzzing is that there are votes that are being called.

That's what that noise is.

That means that we really are in a House office here.

I want to just, you have been very critical of the speed of the process and impeachment and how some of the steps you feel like have been either skipped over or rushed.

But separate from the process argument, I just want to ask quickly here,

do you think it is okay for the president to ask a foreign country to do an investigation that is an investigation that would have been against a political opponent?

I certainly wouldn't advise it,

but I also don't think it's an in fact, I know it's not an impeachable offense, but obviously a majority of the Democrats apparently think otherwise.

You wouldn't advise it as the wrong thing to do?

I just don't think it's smart.

I think it's something like that potentially could blow up in your face and has.

Although I also, something else that concerns me is that when our presidents, and I hope we learn something from this, when the leader of our country is talking to a leader of another country, I don't think we ought to have dozens of ears listening to the conversation and then blab it out all over the place.

For example, you know, the president was talking about Angela Merkel, you know, and how they're not supportive, et cetera.

You know, how is that helpful to U.S.-German relations when people are out there blabbing about disparaging remarks that have been made, et cetera?

So I think it's against our national interest to have all these leaks out there from conversations between our leader and the leader of other countries.

I want to ask about the other other charge that the Democrats have put here.

And again, acknowledging that you feel the process itself has been

bad and broken in a lot of ways.

The other charge is obstruction of Congress, which is based in the idea that because the White House and the President refused to comply with subpoenas and produce documents that were asked for, that that is obstructing Congress.

Is that obstructing Congress?

No, I think that's really a weak charge.

In fact, you know,

I would call it checks and balances between the branches of the government.

The Congress is trying to go after the executive branch and demanding all these things.

The executive branch is saying, no, you're not entitled to those things.

We're not going to get them.

So what do we do?

We ought to go to the courts and let the third branch decide these things.

The Democrats have skipped that process and they just have indicated, well, we're just going to impeach this guy.

That's ridiculous.

Now,

if they didn't have an election coming up, maybe they'd let the process go out longer and go to the courts.

And if the courts said, you got to turn these documents, you got to let these people testify, you got to turn over these documents, I think the president would do that.

But they skipped, I do, yeah, I do.

And that's like Nixon.

Nixon didn't want to turn over the tapes.

third branch, the courts said, yep, you got to turn over the tapes, Art.

And Nixon, you know, resigned within a couple of weeks because, yeah, there was a smoking gun tape that he was trying to hide.

But the Democrats have decided rather than do what you're supposed to do, go to the third branch, the courts, to make a decision, like a referee, they just decided to impeach the president.

So that's, I think, a big mistake.

The argument is that if...

he is not impeached over this,

of the people who support it, that in the future presidents won't feel like they have to turn anything over to Congress.

Do you see that at all?

No, not at all, because, again, they skipped an important step.

was if you have a fight between the executive branch, the presidency, and the legislative branch, the Congress, you go to the other branch, the judicial branch, the courts, and you let them call it.

And the Democrats skipped that and just decided to impeach the president.

That's wrong.

The thing that I feel struck by, and I spend a lot of time outside of Washington on the campaign trail and talking to people outside of Washington, is this feeling of how do we get through this as as a country?

And this being not just impeachment, but what it seems to represent about where we are.

And so can you see why to some people,

you as someone who does not support impeachment, is it possible for you to understand the people who say they don't see how the president can't get impeached?

Oh, certainly.

I hear from all the time.

I mean, the country is divided on this.

Both sides feel very strongly.

And then, of course, you have some people in the middle that aren't really sure at this point and maybe are persuadable one way or the other.

But yeah, I mean, we're split.

What do we do at this point?

We ought to talk to each other.

We ought to work together.

And ultimately,

up here, the elected representatives of the American people out there who disagree on this will vote on it.

And then we follow whatever that vote says.

Now, one thing that does concern me is that assuming that the president is impeached by the House, it goes to the Senate and there are not sufficient votes, and so he's acquitted, a Democratic member of Congress said, well, well, we're going to keep coming back and we're going to file more impeachment charges.

We've never had multiple impeachment charges one after another, but this particular member of Congress has threatened that.

I think that would be a real problem.

Hopefully Nancy Pelosi won't go along with that, but we'll see.

She seemed unwilling to get even this far in the impeachment process, so that does not seem what she would want to do.

But I just...

Did you waver at all for a moment on your thoughts about what to do with impeachment?

Well, I didn't make my mind up until I had the facts.

And now that I've got the facts and was convinced that the president did not commit high crimes and misdemeanors,

then that's going to be my vote.

I asked that just because I feel like where this has landed, there was a poll a month ago already that said that something like 65% of people, doesn't matter what came up in any of the hearings in the Intelligence Committee, the Judiciary Committee, they knew where they were on impeachment.

Yeah, and that is some people, but I reserved my judgment.

I don't know if I'm not sure.

No, no, no, no, it's the right thing to do.

So I just don't know.

And you have

among your constituents people who support impeachment and people who don't.

And

how do we bring them people together?

How do we get to, and people who

feel

in support of President Trump and people who don't?

You have your thoughts on this.

They don't agree with some of your constituents.

They agree with others of your constituents.

What do we do?

Well, we got to work together.

I mean, that's the answer.

It's easier said than done, however.

What does work together?

But it's also, it's also elections, you know, and that's what we're going to have an election.

And the people will ultimately decide this, and they'll either re-elect him or they'll elect somebody else.

And then we move on.

But I'm concerned, again, as I said before, that we're lowering the bar.

And when you have a president of one party and a house of the other party, that we're making impeachment too routine, that our base will demand this of that party, and we're going to see this far too often.

And I don't think that's good for the country.

I'll ask you just one more about the process, and then I know you've got to get to committee here.

You have raised objections to the idea that the president's lawyers did not get to be part of the committee process and produce their own testimony and

evidence here.

When it gets to the trial in the Senate, should President Trump testify?

I doubt that that'll happen, but that'll ultimately be up to

McConnell and Chuck Schumer.

I don't want to tell the Senate what to do.

They don't listen to us here in the House anyway and usually do just the opposite.

And I've got to be in committee, so I literally have to run down there or I'll miss my place in line to speak.

And you know how we politicians are, we love to talk.

We know that.

Congressman Steve Shabbat, thanks for taking the time to be here.

Thank you very much.

Great being with you.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

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