DO JUSTICE
As 1998 ended, President Clinton was impeached by the House for lying to a federal grand jury and obstructing justice. As 1999 begins, it is the duty of right-minded senators to try him, convict him, and remove him from office.

The first article of impeachment focused on Mr. Clinton's August 17 testimony before Kenneth Starr's grand jury, where he reprised the lies he had been telling for months: about his relationship with his intern, about his testimony in Paula Jones's civil suit, about his efforts to corrupt witnesses in that suit. The second article focused directly on his campaign to tamper with the testimony of Monica Lewinsky and Betty Currie, which involved hiding evidence, concocting cover stories, and buying silence with jobs. These crimes were not just about Mr. Clinton's private life, or about sex. As investigative counsel David Schippers said in his summation to the House Judiciary Committee, they constituted "a direct assault upon the truth-seeking process, which is the very essence and foundation of the judicial branch." Removing a president from office is a serious matter. But these are serious offenses.

Mr. Clinton's crimes should be considered along with their circumstances, their attendant moral atmosphere: that he perverted justice not for some mistaken notion of national interest but to serve his convenience and to palliate his lust; that his lust combines adolescent combustibility and crazed risk-taking; that, in the twelve months since the scandal first broke, he never showed the courage or the honesty of a real leader, but repeated his lies and evasions in a dozen forums, from press conferences to prayer breakfasts. Add, finally, that no one can confidently deny that his bombings of Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq were calculated distractions-to such a state has he brought himself and his office. This is the portrait of a man as bad as he is weak, as corrupt as he is immature.

Mr. Clinton's offenses require a trial. It need not move at the pace of Judge Ito: much of the evidence has been available for months, courtesy of the House, the independent counsel, and the press. But there must be a trial, and deliberation. This is why the job of impeachment is given to senators, who serve the longest terms of any elected official and are assumed to have maturity and independence. The various proposals for a speed-reader's trial, disposed by some means short of a vote on conviction, violate the traditions of the body and its duties in trying a president. If this is the spirit in which the senators intend to approach their task, better to have Lou Harris conduct an exit poll after the new Senate convenes and be done with it.

Removing Mr. Clinton from office will not "undo the election," despite what his supporters say with the persistence of frogs in mating season. In 1996, victorious Democrats cast their votes for two men, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore, so that their will should prevail in case of assassination, accident, illness, or high crimes. Despite the guarantee that one of their party will occupy the White House until January 2001, Senate Democrats have already shown that they will be of no use in this matter. Senator Lieberman, the heroic moralist of the early days of the scandal, has spent the last few months greasing the escape hatches for Mr. Clinton.

Senator Moynihan's call for censure brings to mind Murray Kempton's old crack that the Free Katanga Committee of 1962 began its life where most conservative causes end theirs: with the desertion of Everett Dirksen. Moynihan's early criticisms of the president-he said his reported behavior, if true, would represent a "disorder"-have ended where so many of Moynihan's good ideas do: with his own desertion. It looks as if his last important Senate vote will complete the long process of Defining Moynihan Down.

That leaves the job-the thankless job-of doing the right thing to the Senate Republicans. Mr. Clinton's popularity may be sky-high, but senators owe their constituents their judgment-perhaps especially when it is not popular. If Republicans funk the logic of their position now, they will retroactively render it frivolous-an episode of harassment, like former senator Alfonse D'Amato's Whitewater hearings, called off the day Bob Dole lost. If they speak the truth, history will approve their courage, and maybe sooner rather than later. There will be close to two years between any trial and the next election; who knows what Mr. Clinton's record will look like then? But whether judgment comes fast or slow, the time to act is now.

Many impeachment foes in Congress profess to have been consulting the Federalist Papers. If they are still reading, they should consider the great speech on power and trust of the Federalist's main author, Alexander Hamilton, at the New York Convention for ratifying the Constitution in June 1788. "Sir," Hamilton said, "when you have divided and nicely balanced the departments of government, when . . . you have rendered your system as perfect as human forms can be, you must place confidence, you must give power." Checks and balances, he was saying, can accomplish only so much. Rulers must have freedom to act. But they must also earn that freedom by inspiring confidence. When they do not, a free people must strip them of their power.