Mr. Railsback . Chairman, thank you, and members of the committee by saying that you, mr. Chairman, i think in a rather difficult assignment with you because you know on many occasions i think you have handled yourself very well. And i think i can say for the most members of the committee that during these six months through the 38 volumes of evidence, the listening to the live witnesses morning, afternoon and night that i can be proud of my judiciary colleagues, most of them. I feel badly as Charlie Sandman did about the leaks, the selective leaks, some of which i think the newspapers made a mistake in playing. Although i know they have a job. I used to like to be on the House Judiciary Committee when we were worried about penal reform and juvenile delinquency, trying to improve some very important things in our country that needed improving, but im about to reconsider my assignment now that we have had amnesty, abortion, impeachment and now a bomb threat. Let me say that im one of th
Has in fact either authorized the bake in or personal the cover up. We were persuaded beyond a convincing case that he should stand trial in the political sense of having to have a trial in the senate but nobody felt great about it. Most people get burdened. They didnt want to. We felt there was no alternative. We were the elected officials and had a duty to see whether the highest officer in the country had breached his duty. William cohen, 1974, a republican member of the House Judiciary Committee. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for being with us on cspans 3 American History tonight. Tv 8 00 eastern time sunday evening we will continue our look at house judiciary committ committee. Our coverage of the 40th anniversary of water gate continues including debate over article two which charge nixon of abuse with power. You will also hear from the forrer director of the library and museum and explains how the committees vote affecting our understanding of president ial power today.
Committee. After a month of meetings in the articles of and infusion and were about to be introduced. What was happening . Gathering. Ans were i assume the democrats were doing the same thing. There was very little discussion among the members. I did not have a discussion until the night before we actually went public. It was the day before. I met with tom railsback. He invited a number of people to drop by for coffee and it was at that meeting that i first saw what group might be willing, or inclined to vote against impeachment, who might come that morning. I met jim mann and talked to him for the first time. Walter flowers and talked to him for the first time. And Caldwell Butler and we met at that point and said is there anything here that we really all of us could agree on. That would constitute either an abuse of process, abuse of power, i should say, and we went through all of the evidence that we felt was pretty convincing and i think at that point i knew who was voting for and
From i mean, if nothing else i think that should make us all a little bit humble about predicting whats going to happen in the end with this impeachment or even whats going to happen next with this impeachment. For example, this time last night i was all confident, just flat out saying here on the air that before the end of the night last night the House Judiciary Committee was definitely going to vote on articles of impeachment against President Trump. I was forgetting that i should be humble about these things as we all should be. I said, you know, you should definitely plan to get the physical paper edition of your newspaper today because newspapers all over the country their headlines this morning would be these historic front page spreads about the Judiciary Committee passing articles of impeachment against the president. Yeah, i was so sure. Thats actually not what was on the front page of any paper in the country today. In its paper edition at least because of course they didnt
Committee was definitely going to vote on articles of impeachment against President Trump. I was forgetting that i should be humble about these things as we all should be. I said, you know, you should definitely plan to get the physical paper of edition of your newspaper today because newspapers all over the country their headlines this morning would be these historic front page spreads about the Judiciary Committee passing articles of impeachment against the president. Yeah, i was so sure. Thats actually not what was on the front page of any paper in the country today. In its paper edition at least because of course they didnt get to the articles of impeachment last night. I was all confident and cocky being like oh, yeah thats definitely going to happen. It did not happen. That said, i feel like the universe rescued me a little bit on this because the front pages of todays newspapers around the country were still kind of awesome even if they werent those headlines that i predicted ab