Okay, this is interesting:

Hyde, the courageous hero of impeachment, in fact had cold feet -- freezing cold feet. The "real" story can be found buried on pages 484-7 of Bob Woodward's 1999 book, Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate.

No one, including Woodward's editors at the Washington Post, appears to have noticed this brief but explosive tale, known as the "Four Bobs" story. It was not published in the paper's excerpts and no one wrote a story about it.

What it shows is that Hyde thought impeachment stank and he tried to get it killed before it even reached the House floor.

As Woodward tells it, and as confirmed by Huffington Post, just after the House Judiciary Committee voted for the articles of impeachment on December 12, 1998, Hyde, the chairman, privately asked California Democrat Howard Berman to call him at home later after work.

That evening, Hyde outlined to Berman a complex scenario to substitute censure for impeachment: "You've got to go to Bob Strauss" a wheeler-dealer Texas Democrat with bipartisan contacts, Hyde said. Strauss, in turn, was to go to former Republican House leader Bob Michel and former Senate majority leader Bob Dole. "Then they can go to Bob Livingston [who was in line to become House Speaker] and say, 'We've got to have a censure option for the good of the party.' And then Livingston will visit with me and I won't put up much of a fight."

Huh. Would have been smart. The GOP still hasn't washed off the stink of their coup attempt. Censure would have been appropriate. The GOP declined to be reasonable, obliterated a good portion of their moral authority, and propelled Bill Clinton into the mid-60's in the polls.

This entry was posted by Michael Reynolds, on Thursday, November 29, 2007. You can leave your response.