By Chris Satullo

During the Q-and-A period of President Trump’s impeachment trial, the Stepford Senators, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, asked a fair question.

Well, sure, their intent was just to troll Adam Schiff and the other House impeachment managers.  Still, their question contained a kernel which we who support evicting Trump from the Oval Office might do well to chew on a bit.

The two Sultans of Superciliousness asked: “Would former President Barack Obama have had the authority to ask for an investigation into Mitt Romney’s son?”

On one level, this smug query is easily dealt with, in a way that skewers one of the many logical flaws in the GOP defense of the President.  It is possible for a president to have a legitimate power in a general sense, but not to abuse that power in a given circumstance. Secondly, it is impossible to imagine the careful-to-a-fault Obama ever doing such a thing.

Cass Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar, has framed this question better, in a way that should induce in the conviction-hungry (to whose number I belong) an examination of conscience: “Suppose that a president engages in certain actions that seem to you very, very bad. Suppose that you are tempted to think that he should be impeached. You should immediately ask yourself: Would I think the same thing if I loved the president’s policies, and thought that he was otherwise doing a splendid job?“

If you were alive and a Democrat in 1998, of course, Sunstein’s question is not a mere hypothetical. You had to grapple with it in regard to William Jefferson Clinton and l’affaire Lewinsky.

Personally, I had to answer it not only in idle conversation, over beers, but in a very public way with my job and professional reputation on the line.

Let me tell you about that time, in hopes of shedding some light on a bizarre week during which Kenneth Starr and Alan Dershowitz crawled out of the slime to lecture us on our duty and the floor of the U.S. Senate became one big “Got Milk?” commercial.

In 1997 and ’98, I was deputy editorial page of the Philadelphia Inquirer and one of the things I was deputized to do was deliver the editorial board’s opinions on blue dresses, cigars and all the sordid rest.

The Sunday after the Starr Report came out, writing for a badly divided board, I penned an editorial that began:

Bill Clinton should resign.

He should resign because his repeated, reckless deceits have dishonored his presidency beyond repair.

He should resign because the impeachment anguish that his lies have invited will paralyze his administration, at a time when an anxious world looks to the White House for surefooted leadership.

He should resign because that is his best hope to preserve shards of sympathy and respect from the verdict of history, to which he has devoted so much self-absorbed worry.

He should resign because that is the best hope for sorely needed national catharsis.

He should resign because it is the honorable thing.

The piece went on (and on) from there. With that, The Inquirer became the very first paper that had endorsed Bill Clinton (twice, no less) to call on him to step down.

Reaction around Philadelphia was swift and mostly fierce.  Several of my board colleagues who’d lost our hot internal debate over whether to write that editorial marched over to the op-ed page to write by-lined pieces blasting it.  In our blue region, reader response ran something like 4-to-1 against.

 I was summoned to appear on an MSNBC town hall on impeachment. That night, some blow-dried person shoved a microphone in my face and ambushed me with a question exactly opposite from the one the show’s producers had told me I would be asked: “Given your readers’ negative reaction, shouldn’t you retract the editorial?”

I stammered some dumb reply to a national TV audience, instead of saying what I should have: “Would you have asked that question to a Wisconsin paper that opposed Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt?”

Pleasant the experience was not.  But I maintained then and still do today: That editorial was the right call – on principle, on the facts and vindicated by what has happened since.

Understand, that piece was not an endorsement of Starr’s puritanical overreach – egged on by his young (and, as we now know, wildly projecting, guilt-exorcizing) acolyte, Brett Kavanaugh.  Nor of the sloppy, hypocritical impeachment proceedings led by Newt Gingrich. Note that I also wrote the paper’s editorial opposing the conviction of Clinton.

But the sins of the other side, no matter how grotesque, do not give you license to ignore the sins of your own.

Bill Clinton had sex with a young intern under his care.  He then lied about it to the nation and dispatched his Cabinet members around the nation to repeat the lie on his behalf.  He betrayed all of us who’d voted for him despite our well-founded concerns that his wandering eye would jeopardize his presidency, who agreed to support him because he looked us in the eye and swore he’d never do it again.  Then, mere weeks after we gave him a second term, he was back at it.

I asked myself a simple question:  If I, as a manager for a Fortune 500 corporation, had done what Clinton had, should I and would I be fired?  Yes and yes.  So, if that would be just deserts for my sorry ink-stained self, it should be for POTUS as well.

Right now, it’s fashionable in liberal circles to scorn evangelical Christians who sing hosannas to the cruel serial liar and philanderer in the White House simply because he delivers policies and judges they like.  I do that riff myself, often.

But, particularly in light of the awakenings of the #MeToo era, perhaps we to the left of center ought to be a little more willing to go back in time and acknowledge our own faults in this regard.  Plenty of feminists (of both genders) fiercely defended Clinton, waving off his sins, because his policies were “good for women.”   Yet, what he did was as bad and in some cases – looking at you, Al Franken – significantly worse than what led some powerful men to lose jobs during the #MeToo explosion.  (Not as bad as others, such as that hideous criminal, Harvey Weinstein, I hasten to add.)

Democrats’ fit of partisan blindness back then should be a lesson not only to them, but to those Republicans now willing to defend Trump “until the last dog dies.”

Counterfactual history is always a slippery business. But bear with me a moment.

If Clinton had resigned, who would have become President?  Al Gore.  Running as an incumbent with two years of solid performance under his belt, do you really think he would have lost to George W. Bush in 2000? Would Bush even have run?

If Gore, well-steeped in counterterrorism briefings, were president, would 9/11 even have happened? OK, if that’s a bridge too far for you, would he have pivoted after the attack to invade Iraq on false pretenses?  Clearly not.  So, no Abu Ghraib, no Guantanamo, no ISIS. 

If that’s not enough for you, what about climate change?  Is it hard to imagine that under a President Gore, the U.S. would have become more of a global leader, rather than a retrograde, willfully blind sinner, in the face of this extinction threat?

Defending Clinton beyond reason cost Dems a Gore presidency.  What mystifies me most about evangelical conservatives is why they stick with a man who flouts their every stated moral conviction when they have one of their authentic own, Mike Pence, waiting in the bullpen.

Now I don’t relish the thought of a President Pence myself, but why don’t those who share his brand of piety?

I’ll never understand.  I just offer a prayer that these folks suffer the same consequence that the Dems who stuck with Clinton did – losing the presidency – but without the same resulting damage to the nation.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.