“The very definition of a republic is ‘an empire of laws, and not of men.'” John Adams
In May of 1994 Paula Jones, a secretary working for the Arkansas state government, filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton, alleging that he had harassed her while serving as Governor of Arkansas. In preparing their case, her lawyers interviewed female government employees who had been subordinate to Clinton, in an attempt to establish a pattern of workplace misbehavior on his part. Quite a few women told stories of inappropriate sexual advances, and Clinton denied them all.
One of the women deposed by the Jones legal team was a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky, who had had a sexual affair with the President quite literally in the Oval Office. Understanding how damaging this workplace affair could be to his defense in a sexual harassment lawsuit, President Clinton went to extremes in his attempts to cover it up. With assistance from United States Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, the Jones legal team was able to prove that President Clinton’s denials about Monica Lewinsky were false, and in 1998 the President was impeached by Congress on the grounds that he had perjured himself, and tampered with witnesses and evidence, to cover up the Lewinsky affair.
The reason President Clinton was impeached is that he tried to deny Paula Jones her fair day in court, in a nation where the principle of “Equality before the Law” is supposed to be sacred. But don’t expect to hear that in a college history class.
