Most important, however, the failed effort to remove Clinton appears to have encouraged the belief of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that impeachment is an ineffective constitutional restraint and that a president seeking to accumulate authority in the White House could do so without effective challenge. Ironically, Kenneth Starr's effort to topple one president has helped empower another. Ten years later, the consequences of the Starr report are still unfolding.
David E. Kyvig, distinguished research professor at Northern Illinois University
Btw ConservingStupidity, what were you ZOTTED for 6 months ago?
Can you quote a historian you consider reliable to the effect that Prohibition was not supported by Progressives?
'Progressives weren’t the only actors cast in the prohibitionist drama. But they played the starring role.
'The muckrakers writing for McClure’s and Colliers averted their downward gaze from Big Oil and Big Railroads towards Big Booze, with Upton Sinclair’s The Wet Parade seeking to caricature liquor interests the way The Jungle had undermined Chicago meatpackers. The Wobblies, countering most of organized labor, pushed prohibition. So did The Masses, the journal of the supposedly gay and carefree Greenwich Village Left. Its hard-Left successor, The New Masses, peddled prohibitionist literature. Dry articles in The New Republic and The Nation exponentially outnumbered wet ones. Proponents of the Social Gospel, such as Jane Addams and the Federal Council of Churches, might have jailed an early 20th-century Jesus had he dared turn water into wine.
'Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of the navy banned booze aboard ships. Wilson’s Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, the populist rock star who famously implored Democrats to ditch the gold standard, refused to serve booze at diplomatic functions (perhaps helping to explain the subsequent diplomatic breakdown). He later even suggested revoking the passports of Americans who imbibed abroad. Although Bryan’s boss vetoed the Volstead Act, he signed the law making the District of Columbia dry.
'More unequivocal on the question were the capital “P” Progressives, whose state parties endorsed national prohibition in Michigan, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, North Dakota, Utah, Oklahoma, Georgia, New Mexico, Vermont, Maine, and points beyond. “The Progressive Party,” its Ohio affiliate boasted in 1914, “is the only political party this year that stands for State and Nation-wide Prohibition.”'
- Human Events: "Progressives’ Prohibition" by Daniel J. Flynn