Finally we can all get back to the business of running the country! The tawdry saga of Clinton's impeachment is over. The news media, nonpartisan as it always is, impressed upon us that the Senate's vote marked "The End" of a messy affair that should never have happened. What a relief that the man who admitted lying to his constituents can now turn his attention back to his interns and, we hope, to "the people's business." But there is at least one thing for which the American people can really be thankful: we might finally be able to turn on the television set again without seeing the smiling face of Harvard's Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Alan Dershowitz.
        Dershowitz, a self-described Democrat and "personal friend" of the president, has been an outspoken critic of those who advocated removing Clinton from office. Whether trumpeting his views as a regular on Geraldo Live! or staging a rally in Harvard's Science Center on behalf of the president, Dershowitz has insisted continually that lying under oath should not be an impeachable offense. He has also expressed his views -- using a far more reasonable and less hysterical tone -- in his book Sexual McCarthyism, which analyzes the Clinton administration scandals and their impact on the American constitutional system. While Dershowitz has some excellent suggestions for reforming certain aspects of the Justice Department, he underestimates the moral and political violation that lying, especially under oath before a grand jury, constitutes.
        Dershowitz is correct to point out that ours is not a parliamentary system and that our president is not subject to votes of no-confidence by Congress. The president should not be removed because of "general dissatisfaction with [his] policies, preferences, or lifestyle." We have regular elections to remove him on those grounds. Nonetheless, our Constitution does allow Congress to impeach the president for "high crimes and misdemeanors." The Constitution allows Congress to determine what constitutes a crime. Lying under oath is a crime (no one disputes that) and if Congress sees fit to impeach the president for breaking this particular law, it is a poor defense to argue that this wasn't that big of a crime. If Clinton wanted to avoid impeachment, he shouldn't have broken the law. Does Dershowitz really feel that he protects the Constitution by insisting that Congress turn a blind eye to presidential crime?
        Dershowitz argues that some crimes are worse than others and that impeachment should be reserved for the gravest offenses. Even after conceding that fairly obvious point, it seems inappropriate for Democrats to become indignant over their president's being subjected to an investigation. After all, he broke the law and brought it upon himself. Nonetheless, Dershowitz raises an important point: does lying under oath amount to an abuse of the public trust and should Congress have removed the president from office for such abuse?
        Ultimately this is a question that turns on expectations. If the American people are content with a government staffed by men and women willing to lie under oath, perhaps Clinton's offense seems like politics as usual and impeaching him seems like an overreaction. Dershowitz demonstrates that lying under oath has been tolerated in the past, that George Bush, for one, pardoned perjurers. Without getting into presidential pardons, an entirely separate subject attendant with separate considerations, we should be clear here. All presidents who lie under oath should be impeached.
        Dershowitz and like-minded partisans are now arguing that its time to "get back to business." But this kind of rhetoric only makes sense if one really believes that Congress wasn't doing it's job when it impeached, and ultimately acquitted, Clinton. If it's possible that that the president did commit perjury, what could be more appropriate than an investigation geared to find out? Some may think that the investigation was done poorly, and others that the president was innocent. But we should all  agree
that an investigation into possibly illegal activities on the part of the President of the United States is both the people's business and a top priority.
        The Senate's attitude seemed to be that either Clinton didn't commit perjury, which, after all, is quite possible -- the man is a Yale-educated attorney, quite crafty with words and able to maneuver around legal definitions -- or, even if he did commit perjury, that it didn't rise to the level of an impeachable offense. But what should scare us isn't the attitude of our Senators but the attitude of our countrymen. Poll after poll shows that the American people simply don't care whether their highest elected official lies under oath.
        The idea that it's okay to lie about "little things" is absurd. Are we to assume that on a more important and politically volatile subject, where it might also be in Clinton's personal interest to lie, that he is going to be honest? If he did commit perjury, he is a man without a fundamental respect for the truth. We simply can't trust someone who sets aside the truth when it's  convenient for him. It was therefore incredibly important to determine whether Clinton lied, and not merely an attempt to embarrass the president with the details of his tawdry affair.
        But of course, we already know he lied. Maybe not under oath, but he lied to us, facing the cameras, wagging his finger, telling us he wanted to "be clear" that he did not have "sexual relations with that woman." Can you impeach him for that? Probably not, although it's questionable whether a president who directly lies to his employers, the people, should remain in office. He has abused the public trust and has flouted the very cornerstone of morality and justice -- the truth. We can never again trust Bill Clinton.
        So we have to question the Senate after all, despite what Dershowitz and his ilk say to the contrary. All senators who voted to acquit must have believed that Clinton did not actually commit perjury. For if he did lie under oath, regardless of what it was about, he deserved to be impeached and the Senate had a duty to convict him. Sadly, there are those senators who, like Clinton, want it all. They want to say that he committed an "indiscretion" with the truth, but that he shouldn't be removed from office. These senators, predominantly Democrats, have failed to grasp the gravity of Clinton's offenses.

America's citizens and institutions deserve better. To the extent that, as Dershowitz shows in his book, Republicans have employed a double-standard in this issue, they are at fault. In that case, Dershowitz's book should be read as a call for more vigorous prosecution of public officials that feel entitled to distort the truth under oath.  But when he turns his formidable intellect towards defending Clinton, Dershowitz becomes his willing accomplice. In doing so, he joins the United States Senate and the 60% of the American people who have chosen to ignore the president's conduct.