Word: legalism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...days before they finished writing the Constitution, the men working on it stumbled on an unresolved question: Under what circumstances should Congress be able to impeach the President? No doubt tired of parsing legalisms after months of work, they took only about five minutes to dispense with the constitutional crisis. They had already decided that treason and bribery were no-brainers--definitely grounds for impeachment--but George Mason of Virginia said he was concerned that those two crimes didn't capture "many great and dangerous offenses." So he suggested adding "maladministration" to the list of impeachable no-nos. When others...
...choice between core values: between privacy, which has become so fragile, and morality, which has become so debased. Kenneth Starr and Bill Clinton, hunter and quarry, one wielding his scorching flashlight, the other his anointed cigar: Which troubles people more? One prosecutor, unaccountable, brought the full force of the legal system to bear in probing private sexual behavior; one President, implacably evasive, drew on the full weaponry of his office simply to hold on to it. The verdicts the American people will render in the weeks to come are less legal judgments than moral and political ones about both sides...
Before it is all over, the really hard test won't be whether legal scholars reach some consensus on whether Clinton's conduct met the standard for high crimes and misdemeanors; or whether Republicans would rather a weakened President Clinton serve out his term than an energized President Gore; or whether the commentariat declares that Clinton is a dead man. The hard test is whether in 50 years Americans will look back at 1998 and say that we raised the bar for public office so high that only saints need apply, or that we dropped it so low that moral...
...what about the legal thing?" Morris says Clinton replied. "You know, Starr and perjury and all?" Clinton had already denied the affair in his Jones deposition, but, Morris says, the President admitted to him that "with this girl I just slipped...
...official Republican rationale for the wholesale release is that it would all be leaked anyway. It's a valid concern. But clearly, the sight of the President squirming under the hot lights -- and splitting some extemely fine legal hairs -- is expected to appeal to the horse sense of ordinary Americans, who know a lie when they see and hear one, no matter what David Kendall says. The supporting documents, meanwhile, will be aimed more at the groin. Much of material Starr left out of his report is, as Rep. Chris Cannon of Utah described it, "stuff that makes me blush...