The Book of Bastards (22 page)

Goldwater Girl, top of her class at Wellesley College, corporate lawyer, First Lady, U.S. Senator from New York, and secretary of state. Hillary Clinton has a lot of “firsts” to her credit. Her inclusion in this book is also something of a badge of honor; after all, most bastards are tough and ruthless, and Clinton is both of those things. She is also one of the smartest people to ever enter politics. Plus, let's face it, in order to get ahead as a politician,
and
to stay married to fellow bastard Bill Clinton, you've got to have some bastard in you as well. And Hillary Clinton surely does.

But before she was First Lady or a U.S. Senator or secretary of state, Clinton was a ridiculously successful corporate lawyer. And during that time she became embroiled in the first of what proved to be a number of scandals: a failed 1980s-era real estate deal called Whitewater.

In 1993 Independent Counsel Robert Ray was appointed to investigate the matter. His final report was issued in 2001, the year in which Bill left office, and he cleared the Clintons of all wrongdoing.

The problem for the Clintons: Hillary was anything
but
passive when responding to questions about Whitewater. She was hardly mild-mannered about damned near anything, for that matter. Appointed by Bill to spearhead his health care reform initiative, Hillary came across as high-handed, imperious, and short-tempered in fielding anything other than softball questions from the press.

Whitewater came to be seen by many as “Hillary's Scandal” in large part because several financial documents requested by the Special Counsel's Office mysteriously disappeared from the First Lady's East Wing Office in the White House. They did turn up in a storeroom right down the hall as if by a miracle. It was, of course, the day after a key statute of limitations associated with the ongoing investigation expired. It was all too convenient, especially for the press, which had a field day.

And then a remarkable thing happened: showing herself to be every bit as smart as advertised, Clinton set about reinventing herself. She became a cagier interviewee and someone to be taken seriously on policy matters. When she ran for the U.S. Senate in 2000, she won in a landslide after crossing and re-crossing the state and connecting with voters in ways most of her detractors wouldn't have thought possible.

And after eight years of earning a name for herself in the Senate, Clinton emerged as the favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination in the election of 2008. In a bruising primary fight, Clinton took eventual nominee Barack Obama to the wire. She so impressed him that he named her his secretary of state after he won the 2008 election.

Now that is one successful bastard, regardless of gender!

When it comes to representative government behaving badly, Congress knows how to do it with style. And what the Salary Grab Act was to the nineteenth century, Rubbergate (also known as the House Banking Scandal) was to the twentieth. Both scandals revolved not around the abuse of power so much as the appearance of abuse and the arrogance of those wielding it. Because you've got to be pretty damned conceited to think it's okay to publicly, repeatedly, systematically and with perceived impunity flout rules that govern almost everyone's personal finances. Okay, so it takes more than arrogance. It also takes an ungodly amount of stupidity!

The House Banking Scandal hit the news early in 1992. House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich used the scandal for his own purposes; he pointed to it as an example of “systematic, institutional corruption” that he said was running rampant through the House at the time. Rubbergate was one of the principal scandals that led to seventy-seven Democratic House members being voted out of office in the Republican Revolution of 1994.

It is worth noting that the House Bank was run nothing at all like a normal bank. While computerized systems were the norm for banks in 1992, the House Bank still used paper-and-ink ledgers. Regular statements were not rendered to account holders, nor were they notified when their accounts were overdrawn. Members' deposits were not posted in a timely manner; it could take nearly two months for money to be credited to an account. Further, members of Congress were allowed to over-draw their accounts up to the amount of their next paycheck. The bank
still
never bounced checks written against insufficient funds. It essentially allowed members to overdraw their accounts
ad infinitum
. For this reason, it is inaccurate to say members' nonsufficient funds (NSF) checks were never returned because the bank invariably covered them. The bank also failed to assess fees against members' accounts for the overdrafts.

These loose rules invited abuse. Members of Congress began writing checks they couldn't cash with something resembling absolute freedom from punishment. The worst offender, Democratic Congressman Tommy F. Robinson of Arkansas, wrote 996 NSF checks; his House Bank account was overdrawn for sixteen months. Other members began kiting checks between their House Bank accounts and their personal bank accounts.

The scandal came to public light when the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report on the House Bank late in 1991. At that point, a group of freshman congressional Republicans demanded an investigation. These men later became known as the “Gang of Seven” or the “Young Turks”: Scott Klug (Wis.), Rick Santorum (Pa.), Jim Nussle (Iowa), John Doolittle (Calif.), Frank Riggs (Calif.), Charles Taylor (N.C.), and John Boehner (Ohio).

When the House Ethics Committee conducted an inquiry, Gingrich smelled blood in the water. Many more Democrats than Republicans were implicated; of the top twenty-two check-kiters identified by the committee, nineteen were Democrats. Gingrich then pressured House Speaker Tom Foley to publicly release the names of all members who had written bad checks. Foley, who only wanted to identify the top twenty-two, capitulated and released the entire list. In an early sign of things to come, it was revealed that Gingrich had written twenty bad checks against his own account.

In the end, eleven of the twenty-two worst offenders were defeated in the 1994 election; all but one were Democrats. A later investigation resulted in criminal convictions or guilty pleas for five ex-members, and for the former House Sergeant-at-Arms, Jack Russ.

So there you have it: the United States Congress literally writing checks it can't cash!

Former U.S. Solicitor-General Kenneth Starr built a long career in both private practice and public service. Unfortunately for the morally upright Texas-born son of a small town minister, he may be best known for spouting a line about cigars and vaginas. And Bill Clinton's impeachment trial, of course. A former judge, Starr abused federal independent counsel law in such a way that he got a sitting president impeached for lying about a private matter.

It's hard to forget the maelstrom Starr released in October 1997. Acting as independent counsel Starr recommended that Clinton be impeached for committing perjury in the Paula Jones case and before the Starr grand jury.

The Republican-dominated House of Representatives held off on a vote until after the November 1998 mid-term elections. Even so, impeachment was a major issue that fall; only about a third of the electorate supported Clinton's demise. In fact, the mid-terms that year defied conventional wisdom. The president's party typically loses big in second-term Congressional elections, but just the opposite happened in 1994. The Republicans lost six seats to the Democrats. House Speaker Newt Gingrich's multiple divorces spoke to his own problems with marital fidelity; he resigned.

Despite the mid-term losses and the lack of popular support, House Republicans pressed forward. On December 19, 1998, Congress approved two Articles of Impeachment against Clinton: perjury before the grand jury and obstruction of justice. Two other articles — abuse of power and perjury in the Jones case — failed to pass. Nevertheless, Clinton became only the second president in U.S. history to face impeachment.

On January 7, 1999, the trial opened in the Senate with U.S. Chief Justice William Rehnquist presiding. Thirteen Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee served as prosecutors during the trial. Among them was the committee chairman, Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois, who dismissed his own four-year-long extramarital affair as a “youthful indiscretion.”

Only four witnesses testified at the trial and all did so by videotape: Clinton; Lewinsky; Clinton's friend Vernon Jordan, who got Lewinsky a job working for Revlon Cosmetics at Clinton's request; and Sidney Blumenthal, a senior aide to Clinton.

In the end, the vote fell far short of the two-thirds majority necessary to remove Clinton from office. No Democrats voted to convict on either charge. Ten Republicans voted to acquit for perjury, and five supported release from the obstruction charge. The thirteen House prosecutors paid a heavy price. Only three remained in office after the next round of elections; the rest either lost their individual races or declined to seek reelection.

Even so, Clinton's trial served a longer-term political Republican goal by bringing the “character issue” to the forefront in the next presidential election. Clinton's Vice President Al Gore found himself saddled with much of Clinton's ethical baggage, even though Gore shared none of the blame. Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush ran heavily on this “character,” promising to “restore honor and dignity to the White House.” And without Clinton's problems with truth under oath, Bush was unlikely to have ever entered the Oval Office as anything other than a visitor.

As for Starr, he currently serves as dean of the Pepperdine University School of Law. He still argues cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. He was also a major player in the 2008 grassroots movement to overturn California's gay marriage law.

A Pennsylvania-born military brat, Newt Gingrich earned his PhD in 1971; before entering politics he taught history at the University of West Georgia. He ran for Congress twice before finally winning a seat in 1978. He developed a reputation as a partisan “bomb-thrower.” This strategy worked: within eleven years he had become the number-two Republican in the House.

By 1994, Democrats were marred by many recent scandals — from Rostenkowski's stamps to Clinton's affairs; the public wanted something to change. Gingrich tapped into this angst by promoting the “Contract with America” to give his party an edge in the mid-term elections. The contract proposed eight specific reforms the Republicans would enact on the first day of their Congressional mandate if they gained the majority. It worked: the Republicans were swept to power in the House for the first time since 1952.

The Republicans' takeover positioned Gingrich to assume the Speaker's chair at the start of the 104th Congress. But the road was anything but clear. Gingrich and Clinton would have several bruising legislative battles, culminating in Gingrich's attempt to have Clinton impeached.

Throughout 1995, Gingrich's Congress went to war with the executive branch trying to undo the latter's first-term legislative wins. The mêlée came to a head when the fiscal year ended. Normally, if a federal budget has not been passed by the end of the fiscal year, the government does what it can to keep working. It is customary for the House to pass and for the president to sign various continuing resolutions to keep everything running until the budget is finally approved. Not this time though: Gingrich forced a showdown when he refused to continue talks. The U.S. government ground to a halt and stopped offering all nonessential services for several weeks.

Under pressure from Senate majority leader Bob Dole, who was running for president, Clinton and the Republicans came to an agreement and a budget was passed.

This failed game of chicken stopped the 1994 Republican Revolution dead in its tracks. It also propelled Clinton to reelection in 1996; come 1998, the Republicans would lose precious Congressional seats in the mid-term election. Gingrich later admitted that he shut the government down because he felt slighted over an Air Force One seating arrangement.

In 1998 (shortly after his failed attempt to impeach Clinton), Gingrich became embroiled in his own ethical scandal. Gingrich had claimed tax-exempt status for the Progress and Freedom Foundation, an organization he set up to pitch his college course “Renewing American Civilization.” Gingrich also admitted to lying to the House Ethics Committee when it was investigating the matter; he was ordered to pay a $300,000 fine. For the first time in U.S. history, the House disciplined a sitting speaker. He resigned as Speaker within a year, two years before his nemesis Clinton left
office as one of the most popular presidents of the twentieth century.