Henry Hyde, politics, perjury, the rule of law, and justice

From George Weigel's tribute to Henry Hyde in First Things...

Weigel quotes his remarks during the Judiciary Committee’s first meeting under his chairmanship in January 1995 (after the GOP had taken control of the House)...

In our American system, justice is not an abstraction. Like all the virtues, justice is a moral habit; we become a just society by acting justly. The duty to “promote justice,” which we lay upon ourselves when we pledge to defend the Constitution, is a duty we exercise through the instrument of the law. [For] the “rule of law” distinguishes civilized societies from barbarism.

That simple phrase—“the rule of law”—should lift our hearts. To be sure, it has little of the evocative power of Lincoln’s call to rebuild a national community with “malice toward none” and “charity for all”; to celebrate the “rule of law” may stir our souls less than MacArthur’s moving call to “Duty, Honor, Country.” But if that phrase lacks the eloquence of Lincoln and MacArthur, it nonetheless calls us to a noble way of life.

Legislators—makers of laws in a democratic republic—are involved in a vital task. Ours is not just a job; public service in the Congress is not just a career. What we do here we ought to do as a matter of vocation: as a matter of giving flesh and blood to our convictions about justice—our moral duty to give everyone his due. I have been in public life long enough to know that not every moment in politics is filled with nobility. But I have also been in public life long enough to know that those who surrender to cynicism and deny any nobility to the making of the laws end up doing grave damage to the rule of law—and to justice. If we don’t believe that what we are doing here can rise above the brokering of raw interests—if we do not believe that politics and the making of the law can contribute to the ennobling of American democracy—then we have no moral claim to a seat in the Congress of the United States.

In less than four years’ time, of course, chairing the Judiciary Committee got Henry embroiled in the impeachment inquiry against President Clinton. Hyde was a model of fairness throughout, as even a Clinton defender like Barney Frank acknowledged. His own falls from grace, decades in the past, were dredged up by reporters, aided and abetted (I am convinced) by unscrupulous Clintonistas, all of whom somehow imagined that the impeachment inquiry was about extracurricular sex...

Instead, the question to Hyde was far more serious:

How could the nation have as its highest law-enforcement official a man guilty of a crime—­perjury—for which more than a hundred other men and women were serving time in federal prisons?

From there...

When the House managers solemnly carried the Articles of Impeachment across the Capitol to the Senate, Henry Hyde saw in Trent Lott’s eyes (as he told me later that night) that “we’re not going to make it; Trent won’t fight.” Rather than let the trial of the president descend into farce, Henry tried heroically, through the force of argument and rhetoric, to keep the country focused on the nobility of the rule of law, as he did in opening the Senate trial for the House managers:

Every senator in this chamber has taken an oath to do impartial justice under the Constitution. The president of the United States took an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in his testimony before the grand jury, just as he had, on two occasions, sworn a solemn oath to “faithfully execute the laws of the United States.”

The case before you, Senators, is about the taking of oaths: the president’s oaths, and your own oaths. That is why your judgment must rise above politics, above partisanship, above polling data. This case is a test of whether what the Founding Fathers described as “sacred honor” still has meaning in these United States: two hundred twenty-two years after those words—sacred honor—were inscribed in our national charter of freedom. . . .

In recent months, it has often been asked—it has too often been asked—so what? What is the harm done by this lying, by this perjury? The answer would have been clear to those who once pledged their sacred honor to the cause of liberty. The answer would have been clear to those who crafted the world’s most enduring constitution. And the answer should be clear to us, the heirs of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay.

No greater harm can be done than breaking the covenant of trust between the president and the people; among the three branches of our government; and between the country and the world. For to break that covenant of trust is to dissolve the mortar that binds the foundation stones of our freedom into a secure and solid edifice. And to break the covenant of trust by violating one’s oath is to do grave damage to the rule of law among us.

The Senate acquitted the president, but students of American history will read Henry Hyde’s remarks during the impeachment inquiry and trial for decades after President Clinton’s memoir (with its bitter criticisms of Hyde) is pulped.