Resignation: Pro and Con Over the weekend, U.S. Rep. Ed Bryant, a Republican from the 7th Congressional District and a member of the House Judiciary Committee, insisted straight-facedly that he would be open-minded on the issue of impeaching President Clinton. He then defined several grounds for impeachment – all of which seemed tailor-made to include the president’s recently revealed (and quite idiosyncratic) misdeeds. All he neglected was to include in his bill of particulars certain odd anatomical tricks performed with cigars. Simultaneously, the state Democratic Executive Committee, meeting in Nashville, voted unanimously to urge Tennessee’s congressional Democrats to resist impeachment to the bitter end. Let’s not kid ourselves: Impeachment is going to be a party-line issue, pure and simple. President Clinton will be voted down in the House; he might even lose enough wavering Democrats to be convicted in the Senate by a two-thirds majority. That’s the reality faced by the president and by the nation which, though harboring no illusions about his suspect personal character, has twice elected him to be its leader. Then there’s the resignation option. By taking himself out of the game at a time when his job approval ratings are still high, Clinton could reassure loyal but desperate Democratic candidates hoping to escape the undertow of the Lewinsky ignominy. That might limit the damage to both Clinton and the presidency while allowing him to keep a modicum of personal dignity. It would also, importantly, constitute an acknowledgement of moral error. Even for those to whom standards of personal conduct are unimportant, Clinton may have squandered his claim to the presidency by his frat-boy folly in allowing himself to be stalked, set up, and then exposed to public humiliation by a jilted and pouty Valley Girl. There are several good arguments against resignation, however. One is that citizen Clinton, shorn of the protections of the presidency, would thereby subject himself to the certain prospect of being prosecuted and indicted – for perjury and whatever else a vengeful and victorious Kenneth Starr could make stick. Another is that Attorney General Janet Reno has already set in motion the investigative machinery that could saddle a newly sworn-in President Al Gore with yet another full-time vendetta overseen by yet another special prosecutor – this one charged with looking into Gore’s role in campaign finance abuses. The current generation’s long national nightmare not only won’t be over, it won’t even skip a heartbeat. But the most compelling argument against a presidential resignation is simply this: It would reward a far more alarming abuse of power than anything committed by Bill Clinton or, for that matter, by the late Richard Nixon. Special prosecutor Starr was empowered originally to investigate hanky-panky in a 1970s Arkansas land deal, a dubious enough enterprise for the federal government to be pursuing in the late 1990s. Some $40 million later, with no case against either the president or Hillary Clinton, Starr somehow segued into examining Clinton’s private life. (His report now exonerates Vernon Jordan, the supposed link between the two circumstances.) In prosaic but prurient detail, Starr has revealed what he found: a sinner. It is all too vivid a reminder of J. Edgar Hoover’s near-criminal prying campaign against the late Martin Luther King. So long as Bill Clinton’s redemption – either moral or legal – remains even a remote prospect, it is a far better option than giving in without a fight to this latter-day Torquemada, this inquisitor without mercy.