Expel the Pretender. Eve Wiederhold
We need to be able to count upon the idea that testimony given in a legal setting should be as faithful to the truth as possible. Further, the rule of law, in general, should be sacrosanct if we care about preventing despotism.
But when the concepts of governance and obedience were incorporated into public arguments in 1998, the idea that the law’s authority should absolutely and resolutely govern both the production of speech and audience reception not only failed to persuade a majority, the dedicated support for this way of perceiving issues cost the Republican party five seats in the House during the 1998 mid-term elections. As noted by political scientist Gary Jacobson, it was “only the second [time] since the Civil War that a president’s party has increased its share of seats in a mid-term election” (21).12 Many perceived pro-impeachment arguments to be empty, overwrought, “just” rhetoric, mere pretense, and hence dismissible.
As debates circulated in 1998 about the significance of Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, GOP leaders had to convince audiences that they were sincerely raising a question about whether Clinton should be impeached. To appear to conduct a genuine inquiry, lawmakers gathered to talk things over, but because views about what was at issue were sharply divided along party lines, precisely how to organize discussion in the proceedings became bogged down in controversy itself. Congressional leaders endeavored to devise terms to name interpretive procedures that presumably would keep the question of impeachment open rather than rationalize a predetermined verdict. A language was needed that could clearly describe interpretive practices that truly enacted inquiry. Presumably, during the October meetings that took up the question of how to stage an impeachment inquiry, House members would be able to skirt the problem of simulacra by proposing deliberative procedures that would establish something akin to “best practices.” (Or, to put this in the language of mimesis, any speaker’s description of how to evaluate the meaning and significance of the evidence to impeach would correspond to that speaker’s actual conception of how representational processes work to facilitate a genuine inquiry within a legal proceeding.)
Debates in 1998, however, demonstrated precisely the inverse—that languages about procedures did not neutrally transmit uncontroversial depictions of evaluative practices. Once the House Judiciary Committee voted (21–16) to pursue an inquiry into the question of impeachment (Oct. 5, 1998), the House as a whole met to address the question of whether to approve the Judiciary Committee findings. Disagreements followed as Congressional leaders found themselves not only arguing about how to regard Clinton’s speech acts, but also about how to determine a method for exploring the question of whether criminality had made an appearance.
Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) opened that judiciary committee meeting with a statement that attempted to set parameters:
We have another ideal here: to attain justice through the rule of law. . . . And so here today, having received the referral and 17 cartons of supportive material from the Independent Counsel, the question asks itself: Shall we look further or shall we look away? I respectfully suggest we must look further by voting for this resolution and thus commencing an inquiry into whether or not the president has committed impeachable acts. We don’t make any judgments. We don’t make any charges. We simply begin a search for the truth.13
On the face of it, this statement might sound reasonable, if not rudimentary. If objectivity is obtainable, then we all might agree that the October meetings were, indeed, quite directly about establishing procedures and not about determining who was engaged in this historic event just for show. Hyde’s opening statement attempted to avoid that thicket of ambiguity by clearly describing the situation at hand. Ostensibly, facts about the alleged crime had been collected and were available for review. At least sixty thousand pages of evidence had been produced by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr to demonstrate that a crime had been committed. The evidence, meanwhile, was treated as a re-presentation of a “fact-finding” mission, delivered in narrative form, presumably neutral, presumably reasonable and hence devoid of any language uses that would persuade audiences to adopt a particular view of what the facts meant. When considering whether they were compelled to look at that evidence in the first place, Congressmen advocating an inquiry responded: Of course. How could a responsible inquiry move ahead but by taking a look at the evidence collected?
We might, then, expect few to disagree with the seemingly reasonable response from U.S. Rep Tom Delay (R-TX) about why legislators should always take a look at the possibility that a political leader has engaged in criminal activity: “Closing our eyes to allegations of wrongdoing by voting no or by limiting the scope or time constitutes a breach of our responsibilities as members of this house.”14
When proposing to take an objective look at the facts, both Hyde and Delay invoked what might be described as a scientific model of deliberation that envisions inquiry as objective and guided by an empiricist process in which a search for facts is made possible because “facts speak for themselves.” This version of realist discourse implicates style in that it maintains that forms of representation should facilitate the endeavor to both engage responsible deliberatory practices and signal one’s true intentions to others. The words we use to name this kind of engagement describe actions such as categorization, differentiation, logical clarification. These words tend to be read not as words but as clear descriptors of bona fide actions that correspond exactly to what is named—scrutinizing, clarifying, ordering, establishing causal links between various points of a perspective. Typically, the realist strategy is not read as a strategy but as the means for conveying and activating a rational process that makes it possible to obtain the objective overview the critical thinker is expected to take.
The practices that appear to actualize rational procedures of deliberation draw upon the same scopic paradigm (see Martin Jay) that invokes a metaphor of vision to depict political judgment as an act of critical scrutiny. Impeachment advocates were able to summon this paradigm because it is a familiar one with a long and venerable history that, according to Davide Panagia, extends from the writings of Thomas Hobbes to Jeremy Bentham to the contemporary theories of Jürgen Habermas, whose ethic of communication calls for open debate that enables interlocutors to mutually recognize and validate the most reasonable premise. The organizing logic conflates democratic practices with public scrutiny and affirms the validity of the mimetic act of “presencing” while rendering its reception as tantamount to deliberation’s very character. Once this narrative depiction is referenced as a real descriptor of deliberatory practices, then it will seem both logical and ethical to expect that language users should put forth acts of representation that facilitate a straight forward review.
But rather than prove that the language of empiricism is available to buttress deliberatory processes, the October meetings demonstrated that proclaiming a desire for representational order will not necessarily instigate it. Disagreements arose about every aspect of the inquiry in ways that implicated the role of narrative in establishing visions of what actually constitutes critical scrutiny. When Republican members effectively said, “yes, let’s look at this,” Democrats responded, “at what?” and “for how long?” As summed up by U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA): “The chairman said we shouldn’t look away, we should look further. I agree. What we shouldn’t do, however, is adopt a resolution that says, ‘let’s look around. Let’s see what we can find.’”15
Democrats who did not want to pursue an inquiry at all—those who felt that the calls for impeachment were a charade—raised objections to Republican methods of obtaining and processing evidence. They posed questions that, initially, seemed to be straightforwardly procedural: How much time to devote to deliberation? What evidence should be examined to insure that a look at facts took precedence over innuendo? But even these seemingly simple questions encountered the problem of translation that accompanies the endeavor to distinguish style from substance. Rather than generate an unassailable linkage between a narrative describing an ideal inquiry and an actualization of that ideal, the October debates about whether to even consider the option of impeachment revealed a fundamental inability to demonstrate that words connect to practices in ways that would enable the spectator to ascertain differences between the fake and the true. How, for example, to represent and bring to full presence the intangible and fluid experience of deliberating? What to do to insure that legislators were truly engaged in the labor of thinking and not delivering preformed stylized performances?
When,