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When it comes to reviewing the impeachment process with you, quite frankly, I could just as soon have done without the honor. Not the honor of being with you today, where I am truly honored to be, but the more dubious honor, of being one of only 154 men or women who have participated as United States Senator in an impeachment trial of the United States President.

I entered the Senate during the year that the House came close to passing articles of impeachment against President Nixon. I vividly recall how traumatic a national experience we were going through then.

And I have read the historical accounts of the turbulent post-Civil War, post-Lincoln assassination period when Andrew Johnson was impeached by the House and tried by the Senate. And I can tell you, that was a traumatic time for the country as well. I do not yet know how traumatic the experiences of the past year are going to be for us. However, I can tell you that whenever the United States Senate is sitting as a court of impeachment, under its exclusive constitutional authority to try an impeachment of a sitting president, something is wrong.

Either something is wrong with the person holding the office of the President, or something is wrong with the House of Representatives, who must bring the charges to the Senate. Impeachment is an incredibly serious and severe remedy, since it can ask the Senate to cancel the effects of the last national election. Under our system of separated powers, that is something we never should do except in the most extreme circumstances.

The Framers understood the dangers of abusing the impeachment power. In fact, Charles Pinckney warned that a willful Congress might abuse the impeachment power as a “rod” to beat a President into submission to its will.

Our system of government requires that we have a strong and independent president. A President strong enough to protect our individual liberties, as Harry Truman was when he integrated the Armed Services by executive order. Or a President strong enough to lead in foreign affairs, as George Bush was when he rallied support to contain Saddam Hussein’s aggression in the Gulf War. The impeachment power must be used very sparingly if that independence is to be maintained.

So something needs to be terribly wrong with the person in the White House for impeachment to be warranted – or else something needs to have gone awry in the House for them to have passed articles of impeachment when they were not warranted.

In this case, it was a combination of the two that best explains how we got to a point on February 12, 1999, just after noon, where I, along with my colleagues, were casting votes on two articles of impeachment against William Jefferson Clinton.

We can take away a lot from this experience. And I am sure that scholars will be analyzing what happened for years to come. When you have an event like this only twice in the nation’s history, it is natural to try to learn what you can from each occurrence. Hopefully, to prevent it from happening again.

I want to share with you six lessons I take away from the impeachment process. There is a great more to say on this subject and I will be glad answers questions on other aspects of it after my remarks.

1. Lesson Number One: Americans Have a Moral Code

Throughout the process, many were saying that as soon as Americans focused on the immoral nature of the President’s conduct, they would be outraged by it and a ground swell would grow behind the impeachment effort. My good friend, Bill Bennett, even wrote a book entitled “The Death of Outrage” where he articulated this sentiment.

Yet, as that ground swell never materialized, the same voices came to accuse Americans of simply lacking a moral code.

To me, this is exactly the wrong diagnosis. From the very first disclosures of wrongdoing – first the affair with Monica Lewinsky and then the lies about it to the American people – Americans decried what the President did. Never in the entire impeachment process did I hear anyone rise to defend the President’s conduct. Americans concluded that he was an adulterer and a liar, and they condemned him for it.

Americans in fact concluded that there were very few good guys in the entire affair. They thought that Ken Starr abused his authority by unfair tactics born out of vindictiveness. They thought that the House Managers acted in a narrowly partisan way and advanced the impeachment process in a desperate attempt to justify their actions for the sake of their own political reputations. They came to see Monica Lewinsky as both used and a user, while Linda Tripp, Lucianne Goldberg, Paula Jones and her official and unofficial legal team came to be seen as part of a larger political plot to “get the president,” at any cost.

This, in fact, is one of the contributing causes of the entire episode – there were no good guys looking out for the best interests of the country – from the President on down.

How the public judged everyone else involved in the process, however, did not influence the judgment they made on the moral quality of the President’s conduct. They abhorred it.

2. Lesson Number Two: The Founding Fathers Would Have Been Proud of Americans’ Understanding of the Impeachment Process

Presidents can only be impeached for “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” We in the Senate spent a great deal of time debating just what high crimes and misdemeanors were. We looked at all the writings from the Founding Era that bore on that question.

Among the most quoted of these passages came from Federalist No. 65, which Alexander Hamilton wrote to explain the impeachment power and why the Senate had been selected to be the body that would try impeachments. In that passage, Hamilton says:

[t]he subjects of [the Senate’s impeachment] jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which with peculiar propriety may be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done to the society itself.

Justice Story, a Supreme Court Justice in the 1800s and the author of the leading constitutional law treatise of the time, said something similar when he wrote that impeachable offenses are “offenses which are committed by public men in violation of their public trust and duties.”

I could quote additional statements for you – or I can refer you to speeches that I made before the impeachment process began or to several memoranda I wrote during the process that contain most of them.

Suffice it to say that I, as well as hundreds of law professors and historians who have studied the issue, concluded that the constitution meant to limit those acts for which a President could be impeached to serious breaches of official duty or other gross abuses of the public trust that place the country’s government at risk.

I think that is what the Founding Fathers meant. I also think the Founding Fathers would have been proud of the American people because I think their steady position - and it really was amazing how steady it was in the opinion polls - was that what President Clinton did was wrong, but that it did not warrant removing him from office through the impeachment power.

The American people separated in their minds the job that the President had been doing for them, on the one hand, and his conduct, on the other. They did not approve of the conduct, some may even thought it was criminal, but they simply did not see this conduct as placing the country’s government in jeopardy or as constituting a serious breach of his official duties.

You can call this what you will – a sense of proportionality, a sense that the punishment should fit the crime. Whatever you call it, the attitude is highly congruent with the impeachment clause of the Constitution as the Founding Fathers meant it to be.

This is somewhat ironic, though, because what the Founding Fathers feared most were the passions of the populace who might inflame the impeachment process without regard to the Constitutional limitations imposed by the Framers. Yet, it turned out that it was the American people who had a sensible, and in my judgment, correct attitude toward the process of impeachment. Yes, in the end, the good sense of the American people played a major role in preventing the process from being abused.

3. Lesson Number Three: Haste Makes Waste

As I said a moment ago, the Founding Fathers did fear the abuse of the impeachment power. The independence of the Presidency is undermined if Congress can pull the impeachment trigger for partisan reasons.

I am afraid that this is what happened in the House of Representatives. If you remember, there was a brief period after the November elections last fall when most people thought the loss of six seats by the Republicans in the House signaled that the American people wanted the impeachment process to die in the House.

The Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee pressed on, however, just as the Founding Fathers thought they might. But in order to try to accommodate the popular desire to have the process ended, they committed to doing it quickly.

That was a mistake. They should have taken their time to reflect upon the gravity of what they were doing. They should have permitted a vote on censure. And, quite frankly, they should have taken their time so they could better evaluate the strength of the case contained in the Starr referral.

Now I have been a supporter of the independent counsel statute, but the way that statute worked in this impeachment process shows that this part of it certainly needs fixing. When the Independent Counsel submitted his report, he dropped a time bomb on Members of Congress which had a very short fuse. Once the Starr referral had been received, the Committee began careening down a path to impeachment. While they could have stopped their own momentum, Starr’s time bomb placed them in an awkward position.

4. Lesson Number Four: Two Chambers Are Better Than One

The Framers intentionally and carefully set up the impeachment process as a two step process: the House impeaches and the Senate tries. In their judgment, only the Senate would have the stature to discharge this responsibility. As Hamilton put it in Federalist Number 65:

“Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently dignified, or sufficiently independent? What other body would be likely to feel confidence enough in its own situation to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced the necessary impartiality between an individual accused and … his accusers?”

The process inevitably slowed down when it got to the Senate. The entire procedural context was completely different than in the House.

Impeachment Articles are incredibly special pieces of legislative business. But, procedurally they are handled as recommendations from the House Judiciary Committee and they come to the floor of the House under fairly standard procedures.

In contrast, an impeachment trial in the Senate is a proceeding unto itself. The Senate does nothing remotely like it at any other time.

As a result, rules of proceeding had to be dusted off and examined. Because our historical rules left many questions unresolved, we had to fill in some of the procedural gaps at the beginning just so that we could proceed.

In retrospect, I think wrestling with the procedures, realizing that the Chief Justice would be presiding, understanding the oath to do impartial justice that every Senator must take, appreciating how unusual it was to have all Senators on the floor of the Senate for extended periods of time with almost no staff, all these things helped invest the Senate procedures with the proper sense of solemnity and seriousness so that we all ended up appreciating the awesome magnitude of the task before us and taking it with utmost seriousness.

5. Lesson Number Five: If You Talk the Talk, You Must Walk the Walk

As the impeachment process unfolded, first in the House and then in the Senate, advocates of impeachment made very strong accusations against the President. The sheer length of the Starr Report seemed to verify that the charges against him were very serious and very well substantiated. But the process in the House did not require the House Managers actually to be very specific about the charges, and the articles of impeachment eventually passed by the House were quite general and broad in their scope. In general terms, they asserted that the President of the United States had committed perjury before a federal grand jury and obstructed justice through various acts that impeded the ability of the Starr grand jury to investigate the facts.

But the articles failed to specify in detail what those perjurious statements were and why the various actions of the President amounted to obstruction.

Generalities do not work in a trial. Charges have to be made specific, concrete proof of the facts necessary to prove the charges has to be presented by the prosecutors, and the accused has to be given opportunity to respond to specific allegations and factual assertions.

In the context of the Clinton impeachment, the House Managers had committed themselves to getting over a very high hurdle. You see, the case they said they would prove to the Senate was that President Clinton violated specific federal statutes pertaining to perjury and to obstruction of justice.

What this meant, quite simply, was that they needed to be able to convince me that a prosecutor could convict President Clinton of these crimes by proof beyond a reasonable doubt – the same standard that a criminal court would use. After all, the entire reason that the House Managers were so insistent that President Clinton ought to be impeached was that, in their view, failure to do so would undermine the rule of law and would create a double standard, whereby ordinary citizens who commit perjury sometimes go to jail but the President does not. “No person is above the law,” we were told.

But their concern is real only if the President would be convicted in a court of law – otherwise there is no double standard. So quite apart from whether you think lying about an illicit affair rises to the level of a high crime and misdemeanor, the whole theory of the House Manager’s argument required proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

At the end of the day, I concluded that the House Managers had not made their case with that level of convincing evidence. Further evidence might be developed that would change my mind, but on the basis of the case they made, I had doubts on both accusations.

The point is this: the requirement that the President be tried by a separate body – the United States Senate – acting as a trier of fact – demanded that the House Managers articulate the specific charges clearly and that they then be put to the task of proving them. An impeachment cannot be decided on the basis of sound bites or talking points. Appearances on Larry King Live, Geraldo, Rosey O’Donnell, or The Jerry Springer Show will not resuscitate a dying or dead case. It is one thing to talk a good case, but the Constitutions requires you to actually present that case and prove to someone else that it is a good one.

And, for the sake of the stability of the nation and its government, that is a good thing.

6. Lesson Number Six: Bipartisanship Works

Charles Black, the distinguished constitutional law professor, wrote a marvelous little book on impeachment back in 1974, which remains highly instructive today. In that book, he proposed a method that Senators ought to use in approaching the question of impeachment. He advocated what he termed, “principled neutrality.” And he even suggested a little thought experiment as a way of adopting this method. Before you answer any question having to do with impeaching the President, he suggested that you ask yourself:

Would you have answered the same question the same way if it came up with respect to a president towards whom you felt oppositely from the way you feel toward the President threatened with removal.

What this question does effectively is force you to take a bipartisan stance toward the process.

Bipartisanship is absolutely essential within our system of government. Impeachment is not a vote of confidence on the policies of the President – we have a national election to take that vote. Impeachment, in other words, is not supposed to be partisan politics fought out by other means.

In my opinion, my colleagues and I in the Senate were able to put themselves in this frame of mind just often enough to discharge our responsibilities. A bipartisan stance is no guarantee of unanimity – and some of my colleagues genuinely believed that the actions of the President justified his removal.

In the end, though, five Republicans joined Democrats on voting to acquit on both articles, and another five Republicans voted to acquit on the perjury allegations. To me, this was more than enough bipartisanship. It was, furthermore, bipartisanship that could only have come about because of the combined leadership of Senators Lott and Daschle, as well as the sincere efforts of colleagues on both sides of the aisle. These individuals understood the solemnity of the situation and the magnitude of their decision. Other than deciding whether to send American men and women to war, this vote was the most important vote a Senator could ever be asked to cast.

We have just been forced through a constitutional process designed by people who lived over 200 years ago, and used only once before in our nation’s history. If I had to evaluate the process I would say, first, that the Framers concerns about abuse of the process were legitimate and, second, that their institutional design, combined with the good faith of the individuals in those institutions, worked well to protect us against the abuse that they feared. It should come as no surprise to you, also, that in this regard I would grade the Senate much higher than the House.

Ultimately, though, our constitution works and our government functions as a reflection of the common sense of the American people, which they proudly displayed throughout this past year in their instinctive understanding that impeachment is an essentially anti-democratic mechanism that must be reserved for use only as an extreme measure.

Hillary, thank you for being here today. Your presence here is a big deal. Not merely, because I’m sure everyone here at the base physically appreciates your physical presence, the fact that you’d take your time to be here. You have been for the last six years known around the world for your concern about the plight of people, particularly women and children who are in desperate circumstances.

And you know better than any of us here just how desperate the circumstances are for tens of thousands of innocent civilians. These are not military casualties, these are innocent civilians who are a product of the butchery of a man that I think should be tried as a war criminal.

I know some of you Delawarians are not happy with me because I have been so outspoken in my request for the US being involved and using air power and I believe if need be, ground forces, to deal with this cancer in the middle of Europe. This is a humanitarian crisis but first and foremost, the crisis that created the humanitarian crisis is an international crisis that threatens our long term security, and that is the idea that one man in the heart of Europe could recreate for Europe what we committed as a people we would never again allow to happen.

The human crisis you see today will pale by comparison to what will happen if we allow Slobodan Milosevic to continue in power unabated. Some of you thought we were exaggerating when we said what he was about, what he was doing.

None of you should be surprised, past is prologue, this is a man who helped set up rape camps in Bosnia, this is a man who because of his inflamatory, nationalist rhetoric caused those things we observed, those mass graves, people executed in Bosnia and now in Kosovo.

I’d like to take this opportunity to commend all of you here at the base for the tremendous job you have done and doing in alleviating the plight of so many refugees. I said to some of the folks out on the line, if any of you ever wonder whether or not what you do for a living matters, I guarantee you, I guarantee you do not have to think about it after today because what you are doing matters. It literally is going to be the decision between whether or not someone lives or dies. That’s not hyperbole. That’s literally what you’re doing.

The opstempo at this base has been incredibly high for a long time. A lot of you have been under a whole lot of strain and sometimes you may wonder whether or not what we’re doing really is worth all the effort. But I guarantee having been there, this is worth the effort.

Since the Serbian atrocities began and they stepped up their terror campaign against the Ethnic Albanians, 41,000 people a day have flooded across the borders of neighboring countries seeking respite from the brutality of the police. You hear them refer to as ‘the mop.’ The police and the military of Slobodan Milosevic’s storm troopers. In the past two and a half weeks, innocent civilians, women and children, young and old, have been forced to flee their homes, mostly at gunpoint, after having yielded their worldly possessions in terms of cash to the people who are escorting them out of their homes, stuck in box cars.

Like you saw in Sophie’s Choice, like you saw in Schindler’s List, it’s happening again. Now, 1999. They’re being sent and shipped away, and mark my words, when this is over we’re going to be able to determine and find that tens of thousands of people are missing. And thousands, I predict you will learn, have been summarily executed.

So some say, “why are we doing this?” My response is: If not us, who? If not now, when? And if we allow it to continue, what will we leave for our children? This is not a U.S. effort alone. Every major European nation, 18 NATO countries, are in unison. This is not some idea we thought up. This is about the very stability of Europe.

The Kosovar refugees are tired and they’re hungry. And because of what you’ve been doing, there are mothers who will go to bed tonight in tents and tomorrow and the next day and the next day, teaching their children the same thing that their grandmothers taught them: “Thank God for the Americans. Thank God for what they did.”

So I say to you, if you wonder whether it’s worth it, I promise you, I promise you. I guarantee you, you could not be doing anything more worthwhile today with your life than loading that food on those planes for the people that you’re trying to save. Our Vice Wing Commander Gary Coy is over there right now on the ground helping coordinate this effort.

And the man who runs the entire effort to the United States of America, pulling together all these agencies, is a man who has a heart and brain as big as his body. His name is Brian Atwood and I’m about to introduce him to you. He’s the head of AID, he’s the guy that’s been given the task to put it all together. He’s been a public servant his whole life.

We go back a long time together. I got to the Senate in 1972, and he was there too working for a guy named Tom Eagleton. But like you, he believes he has a responsibility bigger than the one which is just providing for the needs of his family. He’s a patriotic American like all of you. And like all of you, what he’s doing today is among one of the most important things he’ll ever be able to do with his entire life. He’s going to help you to help us save tens of thousands of lives of non-combatants, women and children, loaded into box cars, left on the side of mountains. You’re doing a good thing. I’m proud of you. I am truly, truly proud of you. And I’m proud of Brian Atwood. Brian, welcome to Delaware.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have been asked to reflect on the role of the United States in the world as we enter the twenty-first century. It is generally recognized that because of this country’s size, wealth, technological expertise, and societal flexibility, it is in a unique position to exert influence on the world stage.

Nonetheless, the cliché describing the United States as “the sole remaining superpower,” while literally true, strikes me as somewhat beside the point. We may be unchallenged in the depth and breadth of our might, but in some ways we had more effective power relative to many other countries in the days when we were challenged by the other superpower, the Soviet Union. The world has become a much more complex place, and no single player can dominate it.

Even if it wanted to, the United States certainly could not solve every global problem alone. But it is difficult to imagine a major world problem that could be solved without the involvement of the United States, and in most cases without American leadership.

This means that in order to lead effectively, the United States must also cooperate - cooperate with its allies, its friends, and with the rest of the world community in many international organizations.

It is, NATO more than any other organization, that engages the United States internationally, for our relations with Europe are fundamental to our position in the world. Europe, together with Japan and the United States, is one of the three great global centers of wealth and power. And more than any two other areas, North America and Western Europe are on a daily basis inter-related politically, economically, and culturally.

It wasn’t always that way. After World War II large parts of Western Europe were desolate wastelands. Thanks to the wisdom of George Marshall, who announced his far-sighted relief plan here at Harvard nearly fifty-two years ago, the United States primed the pump of European recovery.

But it took NATO, founded in Washington, D.C. fifty years ago this month, to guarantee that these promising beginnings continued. The nations of Western Europe could not have flourished without the security umbrella that the Alliance has provided. Without NATO there would have been no European Coal and Steel Community, no Common Market, no European Community, and no European Union. It’s as simple as that.

Recognizing the changed post-communist world, NATO met in 1991 and revised its so-called Strategic Concept, its mission statement. In it the Alliance enumerated new threats to its members including ethnic and religious conflict, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and international crime and terrorism.

It is true that many of these new threats originate outside of Europe, and that all alliance members share vital interests such as guaranteeing energy supplies from the Middle East and keeping the sea lanes open around the world.

Nonetheless, I reject the idea that NATO partners should be obliged to undertake missions outside of Europe. For the foreseeable future “coalitions of the willing” such as in the Gulf War, which involve the United States and NATO allies who so wish, remain appropriate.

Within Europe, considering the continent as an integral whole is inherent in any attempt to create a stable, just, and peaceful order. But while the formal division of Europe has ended, it has proven difficult truly to integrate its former communist half with the wealthy democratic and capitalist West.

It is clear that, once again, a security structure must provide the umbrella under which democratic politics, free-market economics, and institutions of civil society can painstakingly effect a transformation.

As it did for Western Europe, NATO has a pivotal role to play for the rest of the continent. I believe that the Alliance’s strategy to extend the zone of stability into Central and Eastern Europe should contain three elements:

First, NATO must continue the measured, criteria-based enlargement of its membership. The accession last month of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic was a giant first step in this process, and the “Open Door” must stay open. Second, NATO must deepen its partnerships with non-member states of Europe. The Partnership for Peace, a creative and hugely successful American initiative, already involves forty-four countries in a variety of consultations and operational exercises. Similarly, NATO has concluded two special partnership relationships with Russia and Ukraine. Because of the war in Yugoslavia, Russia has suspended its relations with NATO, but I believe that the Kremlin understands the benefits its gains from continued and sustained involvement with NATO and that at the opportune moment it will resume cooperation. The third element of NATO’s strategy to extend the zone of stability in Europe must be to counter murderous anti-democratic regimes like that of Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic, which whip up the ethnic and religious tensions described seven years ago in the Strategic Concept to further their own authoritarian political agenda. Not only is regional stability at risk in Kosovo, but also our core values. If the West does not stand for putting an end to genocide and vile ethnic cleansing, then what do we stand for? I will be glad to join Minister Robertson in discussing the Kosovo situation at length during our question period. For now, let me summarize my position in three words: NATO must prevail.

The catastrophe in Kosovo illustrates that European-American cooperation is more important than ever. Whenever I am asked why we have contributed six thousand to twenty thousand troops to IFOR and SFOR to protect the people of Bosnia from further massacres, I respond by saying that for most of the last fifty-four years we kept more than three hundred thousand troops in Western Europe to guarantee its freedom. We now have 100,000 soldiers currently deployed in that theater.

I ask the opponents of American involvement in the Balkans the following question: why is the idea of keeping, say eighty-five thousand troops in Western Europe and fifteen thousand in the Balkans, such a radical intellectual breakthrough?

As we in the United States carry the responsibilities of leadership within the NATO alliance we must remember that a constant theme in West European-American relations ever since the founding of NATO has been an equitable sharing of burdens within the Alliance.

It was understandable in the early days of NATO, when Western Europe was in the first stages of its economic recovery, that Washington should shoulder the lion’s share of defense costs. Now, however, with eleven Alliance members also part of the vibrant European Union, and other European NATO members in good economic shape, those days are long gone. The United States has a right to expect that its allies will assume more of the burden.

If there is one positive aspect of the Kosovo nightmare it is that our European NATO partners have been stepping up to the plate, as exemplified by the British role. Nonetheless, the national defense budgets of most European NATO countries are sinking, and with the exception of the United Kingdom, our European partners are allowing an alarming technological gap to widen between their militaries and those of the United States.

Steps must be taken to address this imbalance and close the technological gap in our respective military capabilities. But, I must emphasize, upgrading European military capabilities in a European Security and Defense Identity, known by its acronym ESDI, must not be at the expense of NATO cohesion.

As Minister Robertson has described, the Anglo-French cooperation announced last December in St. Malo (sah-mah-LOW) by Prime Minister Blair and President Chirac represents a potentially important step in creating a real ESDI.

Implicitly responding to the burden-sharing issue, the Blair-Chirac communique declared that the EU is to acquire the “capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises.” It went on in somewhat ambiguous terms to speak of the need to maintain the collective defense commitments of the Atlantic Alliance.

As the United States has made clear, in any ESDI there are “three no’s” that must be observed:

no decoupling of Europe from North America within NATO; no discrimination against non-EU European NATO members; and no duplication of scarce defense resources. I am encouraged by Minister Robertson’s assurances on these issues, but the devil is in the details.

I could not conclude without a personal appeal to the students in the audience not to heed the siren song of the neo-isolationists. Self-imposed detachment didn’t work for the United States after World War I, and it would be incomprehensible in today’s interconnected world.

I urge you, who are receiving the finest education this country can offer, to see it as a duty to be active not only in domestic politics, but also to steep yourselves in the complexities of international affairs and in foreign cultures and languages. Wherever your careers take you, it is a rare profession that does not have an international dimension, so your engagement will further personal as well as national goals.

The United States can, and must, continue to play a positive, leading role on the world stage, but it can only do so with the support of an informed citizenry. I am confident that you will help create this consensus. Thank you.

Reflecting on the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, William Butler Yeats wrote that “a terrible beauty” had been born. To Yeats a bloody victory had been achieved, creating a new world that offered the Irish people the chance to change their lives.

I believe that Central and Eastern Europe in 1999 exhibits the same kind of fundamental break with the past and similarly offers the people of the region new opportunities.

What a change in the last ten years! Communism has collapsed in most of Europe. NATO now numbers nineteen members, including three Central European states. The Federal Yugoslavia of Slobodan Milosevic lies in shambles, and his rule is increasingly in jeopardy. Bosnia and Kosovo have been freed from Belgrade, but, as was the case in Yeats’ Ireland, the people are often using their freedom to kill each other.

Today, in four parts, I would like to suggest some lessons we can learn from our decade of involvement with the former Yugoslavia:

First, I will discuss tactical lessons learned from the conduct of the recent air campaign against Yugoslavia. Second, despite obvious differences in the two cases, I will attempt to use our experience in Bosnia with the implementation of the Dayton Accords as a guide for what to do –and what not to do –in restoring civilian government in Kosovo.

Third, I will look at larger strategic lessons learned, including how the United States Government might deal with future crises in a more systematic way.

Fourth, and finally, I will outline my vision of long-term regional economic and security development for Southeastern Europe.

The air campaign against Yugoslavia was the first war waged by democracies in Europe in the information age. But it probably won’t be the last –and it certainly won’t be the last case in which we contemplate using force. I would submit that the U.S. must adjust to this changed world by developing new policies, often with new modes of operation.

We Did the Right Thing, and We Won

Let us look at what happened. To spare you any suspense, I think we did the right thing in our seventy-eight day air campaign, and we succeeded. The war against Milosevic was of great consequence. If NATO had not acted, the results, I believe, would have been grave.

The war might well have spread, with NATO allies Turkey and Greece being drawn in on opposite sides.

Milosevic would have been able totally to destabilize neighboring countries, as he attempted through his mass expulsion of Kosovars to Albania and Macedonia. Moreover, refugee flows would have severely strained Western Europe.

There would also have been a demonstration effect: other potential demagogic, racist strongmen in Europe would have taken the lesson that their ilk could massacre and “ethnically cleanse” with impunity.

There were, to be sure, real risks in countering Milosevic militarily, but none of the big worries of March 1999 occurred.

First of all, NATO kept together.

Second, the war did not spread.

Third, contrary to expectations, the Republika Srpska in Bosnia did not blow up; in fact, its government has become more cooperative in Dayton implementation.

Fourth, Montenegro’s democratic government, under severe threat from Milosevic, has not been overthrown, although it surely is in need of increased Western support.

Finally, U.S. prestige and influence in the Balkans has not suffered as a result of the air campaign; it has been enhanced.

I recall the immediate effects of the air campaign not in order to rest on our laurels. These achievements come at the end of a decade of involvement in Yugoslavia in which the record is decidedly mixed. It is well worth our while to examine the period, focusing on Bosnia and Kosovo, in order to draw policy lessons for the future.

The U.S. involvement in Yugoslavia in the 1990’s was a qualitatively new experience. Hence, it is not surprising that we made a lot of mistakes; many of them were predictable. Underlying our Yugoslav policy, with regard both to Bosnia and Kosovo, was a commitment to maintain unity within NATO. This underpinning was, I believe, in most cases an absolutely correct ordering of U.S. national priorities. Striking a balance between alliance membership and doing the right thing was, and remains, extremely difficult.

At the risk of opening myself up to the charge of Yankee boastfulness, I believe that both the air war against Yugoslavia could have been handled, and the looming civilian reconstruction in Kosovo could be handled, more efficiently by the United States alone, rather than by an international coalition.

Realistically, though, “going it alone” would be totally impossible to sell politically, either to the American people or to Congress. Moreover, European involvement in Bosnia and Kosovo is an important part of the continent’s political maturation.

The European Union’s lead-role in the Southeast Europe Stability Pact, which I will discuss later, is the most obvious signal that this process, at long last, is moving ahead.

To “come clean,” however, I freely admit that there have been times when I personally have given precedence to the need for American unilateralism over NATO solidarity, such as when I called for a policy of “lift and strike” in a Senate speech way back in September 1992. I was pretty lonely then, and it took three years and nearly a quarter-million dead in Bosnia before we finally adopted that policy.

But this is not the time either to gloat or to rationalize. Rather, we should, as responsibly as possible, review our mistakes in order to formulate policies to bring stability to the Balkans.

Tactical Lessons of the Air Campaign

As promised, let me begin by looking at tactical lessons we should learn from the recent air war.

First, we should maintain unity of command in crisis management. In the twelve months prior to the beginning of the air campaign, NATO was temporarily replaced on several occasions by the Contact Group, which includes Russia.

This switch in the command of crisis management in effect shifted policy because Russia did not have the same goals as NATO. Milosevic, of course, was well aware of this fact and, therefore, was encouraged to believe that he could stonewall on a possible settlement.

Second, we should not have ruled out the use of ground forces even before the outset of the campaign. Preserving uncertainty is a key element of crisis management and is important enough to maintain, even at the risk of dividing the alliance. In fact, once the war had begun I privately urged the President to begin a visible deployment of troops to keep Milosevic guessing.

That is why Senator McCain and I introduced a resolution in April 1999 authorizing the President to “use all necessary force and other means in concert with U.S. allies” to achieve goals in Yugoslavia. White House lobbied against it, allegedly out of fear it would lose an up-or-down vote. It was tabled by a vote of seventy-eight to twenty-two.

Nonetheless, when we finally began to move toward deployment of ground forces late in the campaign, it contributed to changing Milosevic’s mind about the wisdom of trying to hold out.

Third, NATO needs to alter its war-time decision making apparatus. There should be no more North Atlantic Council “town meetings” of the early weeks of the war when unanimity was required for targeting. The structure proved to be unwieldy and was altered in the middle of the war. This was one of the predictable examples of “learning by doing” in a new situation. The new process had only the major NATO allies able to veto targets. The result was hitting television towers, police headquarters, and dual-use facilities like the electrical power grid — whose destruction contributed decisively to the Serbian capitulation.

In the future NATO should decide upon a political-military course, set the strategic parameters, and then leave daily implementation to the alliance’s generals and admirals.

Fourth, in future conflicts NATO must improve its internal communication channels so that the media are not given premature denials of errant bombing or missile attacks. Above all, the alliance must repeatedly underscore the fundamental difference between premeditated aggression, massacres, and war crimes on one side, and occasional, regrettable mistakes committed in morally justified resistance to crimes, on the other.

Fifth, NATO should also never announce positive military moves too early. The textbook case for this was the Apache helicopters, initially touted by many as a “silver bullet” but then never employed in combat, to the embarrassment of the United States Army.

And sixth, the United Nations must have absolutely no command involvement in any NATO-led military operation, beginning with KFOR. We must never repeat the impossible dual-key structure of UNPROFOR in Bosnia.

In spite of all these ways that we could have improved upon our prosecution of the air war, our forces did a great job. As a result, through the use of military force we have arrived in Kosovo in mid-1999 at roughly the same point we were at, through military action followed by high-profile multilateral diplomacy, in Bosnia at the end of 1995.

Restoring Civilian Government in Kosovo

Despite crucial differences between Bosnia and Kosovo, with which this audience is intimately familiar, I think we can profit from three-and-a-half years’ experience in the former in several ways.

Here I think my nearly three decades as a politician help me to cut through some of the haze. We all know that Kosovars, Serbs, Roma, Slavic Muslims, Turks, Frenchmen, Britons, Germans, Americans, and other nationalities have their unique traits and peculiarities. But fundamentally they all want the basics for their families and themselves: security under the rule of law, a job with a living wage, and the absence of discrimination against them because of their race, ethnic background, or religion.

What this means for Kosovo is quite simple. Even while the geopoliticians and development experts are, quite properly, discussing the eventual shape of the Southeast Europe Stability Pact, we have to move as rapidly as possible on the ground in Kosovo to secure the basics I have just described.

Preventing returning Kosovars from killing remaining Serbs, disarming lawless individuals, stopping domestic disputes, getting traffic lights back up and running –all these are essential tasks, for which our marvelous military has not been trained. This is the job for police –in some cases your normal cops, in others European-style, more heavily armed gendarmes.

So, first, we must accelerate the recruitment and deployment by the U.N. of an international police force. The U.N. has had experience in this field, and there is no reason for the lagging that is going on. I pushed early and hard in Bosnia for European gendarmes to take over crowd control, resettlement of minority refugees, and hunting for indicted war criminals. The so-called “MSU’s” or “Multinational Specialized Units” from Europe and Argentina that have been deployed in Bosnia have done the first task, but not the refugee returns or war criminal hunting. In Kosovo, the international police should be equipped and tasked to do all three.

Second, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE, must immediately speed up its program to train local police officers from all the ethnic communities in Kosovo. Again, the OSCE has done this before, and must pick up the pace in Kosovo. The rebuilding of ethnically integrated police forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina has not been a smashing success, but promising strides have been made. If Croats and Muslims who shot at each other in Mostar can now go on joint patrols, as they do, then, I submit, Kosovars and Serbs can do the same in Pristina.

Third, the U.N. must get its act together with regard to creating an interim government in Kosovo. The international community must immediately make funds available to build emergency housing, restore vital services, and fund the salaries of the new, indigenous civil servants. World Bank President Jim Wolfensohn estimated yesterday that this would require $50 million, surely a sum well within our means.

Fourth, a clear division of labor must be worked out among the U.N., OSCE, and the EU (European Union) and close liaison channels immediately established with KFOR. Until now this has not occurred. The not surprising result is that the local population is turning for all advice and permission to the guys with the guns –KFOR.

An important corollary of the division of labor is that bureaucracy and red-tape, especially in the U.N. and EU, must be minimized from the outset, and rigorous oversight mechanisms established. If the U.S. comes across as being overly zealous –in an earlier age one might have said “too Prussian” –then so be it.

Fifth, although self-determination and political freedom are central to Western involvement in the Balkans, a too hasty carrying out of elections can undermine the achievement of those goals.

In Bosnia more than eighty parties, coalitions, alliances, and independent candidates have run for office –certainly a very democratic picture. But the nationalist parties of the three main ethnic groups in Bosnia –Muslims, Serbs, and Croats –were the first to organize, dominated the campaigns through legal and illegal media tactics, and as a result have captured most of the races.

After the carnage, Kosovo needs a breathing space for civil society to re-emerge. Following this necessary pause, but before elections are scheduled, the international community should take an ironclad hold on the mass media and financial institutions in Kosovo to ensure that campaigns are not only “free” but also “fair.”

The sixth and final lesson in civil reconstruction that I would draw also holds true for our military contribution to KFOR. We should not fall into the politically-induced trap the Clinton Administration fell into with IFOR and SFOR in Bosnia of giving a timetable for withdrawal, which from the outset was totally unrealistic. Our only “exit strategy” should be to leave Kosovo when we have fully achieved our goals. The American people must know that we are there for the long haul because it is in our national interest to do so.

Strategic Lessons Learned

Now to the third part of my presentation. Our decade of involvement in Yugoslavia also has yielded longer-term, broader strategic lessons for the future. Above all, it has illustrated that too much of American foreign policy has been reactive. A conceptual framework is sorely needed.

Others have made this same point. The question of priorities in U.S. foreign policy has periodically been examined by private groups. In 1996 a “Commission on America’s National Interests” dealt in detail with the subject.

More recently, former Secretary of Defense William Perry has discussed it. And writing in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Kennedy School Dean Joseph Nye grapples with redefining the national interest. Nye, who also served in the Defense Department in the first Clinton Administration, modestly concludes: “The national interest is too important to leave solely to the geopoliticians. Elected officials must play the key role.”

Dean Nye is right on target. I recommend that the President, working with a bipartisan Congressional group, create an inter-agency planning process on U.S. national interests abroad –both geographic and thematic. The result of the task force’s study would be to classify American interests in categories like “vital,” “very important,” “important,” and “peripheral.”

By my own initial calculus, non-NATO Central and Eastern Europe, including the Balkans, would fall into “very important” geographical interest category, and furthering democracy and preventing genocide would fall into “very important” thematic interest category. Combining these two with the capability, via NATO, to effect the desired outcome created, I believe, a convincing case for military action against Milosevic’s genocidal actions, both in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Apparently the Bush Administration, and the Clinton Administration until late 1995, didn’t see it that way. After the Clinton Administration came over to this policy, it never adequately described the logic of its decision to the American people.

For most of the 1990’s, particularly in the first half of the decade, Congress was left to fill the vacuum. That is a complex, detailed story, which requires more time to relate than we have today. Some of you may wish to pursue this topic in the question-and-answer period.

Suffice it to say that I believe there are two lessons to be learned from this Congressional involvement. First, the internationalists in Congress simply must carry the day against the neo-isolationists. Second, there is a crying need for a Vandenberg-type consensus that “partisanship ends at the water’s edge.”

My Vision of the Balkans in 2010

To what end in the Balkans should we utilize these tactical and strategic recommendations? What is my vision of Southeastern Europe in, say, the year 2010?

For the benefit of its inhabitants, and of its neighbors, the Balkans must end the tribal warfare, which flared sporadically for centuries and became the dominant theme as new nation-states won their freedom from the slowly crumbling Ottoman Empire throughout the nineteenth century.

Now I will turn somewhat messianic. Despite all the well-known defects of modern, economically developed, democratic Western society, I firmly believe that it still offers the individual human the best opportunity for a peaceful, self-fulfilling life.

Translated into today’s world this means that Southeastern Europe should be helped to integrate with Western Europe.

In other words, the Balkans should choose to emulate the good side of twentieth-century European history –the European Union and NATO –not the horrific side of two world wars and the Holocaust.

How do we get from here to there?

First, as the military would say, we must control the environment. This means stabilizing the situation on the ground by disarming the rival armies, militias, and individual civilians. Even while this is occurring, shelter must be provided for more than one million returning displaced persons and refugees.

The international community must then set up a rational system of civilian governance. In Bosnia only now –three-and-a-half years after Dayton–are the governmental institutions finally beginning to work, and there is still much room for improvement.

In Kosovo, as I mentioned, the international community should assume the initial governing burden to give the province breathing space before provincial institutions are created and elections held. This de facto international trusteeship makes imperative the immediate clarification of the division of labor among KFOR, the U.N., the EU, and OSCE, and non-governmental organizations.

During the trusteeship period, every effort must be made to involve all parties within the ethnic Albanian community –from Rugova to the KLA, the remaining Kosovo Serbs, and other minority groups in the beginnings of local governance. The first results of such efforts have not been promising.

Then, we must chart a strategic roadmap for the civil and economic reconstruction of the entire region, not individual countries. I believe that a sine qua non for any regional effort to succeed is a democratic government in Serbia on good relations with its neighbors. Translated into policy that means that we should make every effort to assist the contentious Serbian opposition to topple Slobodan Milosevic. I cannot tell you when and how Milosevic will fall, but I am confident that he will not be in power a year from now.

It goes without saying that while Milosevic struggles to hold onto power, and fails, reconstruction planning must go forward. The infrastructure must be developed on a regional basis with integrated telecommunications systems, trans-Balkan superhighways, new high-speed rail links, and, as economic development progresses, non-stop air links between Balkan countries. Today, for example, in order to fly from Bucharest to Zagreb one must go through Vienna, and the same is true for most other intra-Balkan air routes.

The Stability Pact to be led by the European Union offers the best opportunity for creating this strategic roadmap. The July 30th Stability Pact Summit meeting in Sarajevo, an idea of President Clinton, is exactly what we should be doing.

An important side-benefit of this process is that the Stability Pact can give us the leverage to force antagonists within individual countries, and in neighboring countries, to cooperate. In doing this we would be following the example of the Marshall Plan, which made cooperation among West European states as a precondition for assistance.

Two days ago the EU foreign ministers agreed “in principle” to choose Thessaloniki, Greece as the reconstruction center for the Balkans. I would like to make a counter-proposal for immediate action.

The Balkans comprise a large, diverse geographical area. Therefore, after its July 30th summit, I urge the Stability Pact –of which, I would remind our EU friends, the United States will be an important member –to locate a significant regional headquarters in Sarajevo, a move which would greatly enhance the prestige of the Bosnian national government, help the Bosnian economy, and exert pressure for more rapid implementation of the Dayton Accords.

Within a few years I hope, and expect, to see a Southeastern European free trade area, including a democratic Serbia, with preferential access for its exports to the European Union and the United States.

Thereafter, with EU assistance the countries of this regional common market would move into the euro zone for their common currency.

The Southeastern European free trade area would, sooner rather than later, become part of the EU’s free trade zone, with agricultural products phased in over several years.

Meanwhile, the process of accelerated membership in the EU for individual Southeastern European countries would continue. Slovenia and Hungary are already well on the way toward full membership in the first half of the next decade. Bulgaria and Romania could follow relatively soon thereafter.

The only logical way to cement the security structure of the region is through NATO membership for countries that meet the detailed requirements.

Slovenia already is fully qualified and should be invited as soon as possible as a sign that South Slavs are not congenitally incapable of “joining the club.”

President Clinton in his recent speech in Ljubljana said as much by praising Slovenia as a model for the region.

Romania may also be ready to join NATO in the very near future if it gets its troubled economy back on track.

Bulgaria, with a democratic and free-market government, must clamp down on serious corruption. If it succeeds in doing this, and continues fulfilling its membership action plan, it too could qualify for NATO.

Croatia, after Slovenia the most western of the former Yugoslav republics, has been hampered by Franjo Tudjman’s authoritarian style of rule and his often mischievous policies in Bosnia. Upcoming parliamentary elections offer the promise of a fundamental change in Croatian domestic and foreign policy, which could enable it to join the Partnership for Peace and dramatically enhance its chances for NATO and EU membership.

Am I certain that my vision is possible? No, I’m not. But I am reasonably confident that there is a decent chance it can be implemented. I stress that there must be a domestic U.S. consensus in order for us to devote the necessary human and material resources to the task.

Many Senators and Representatives shrink back from such a commitment, either because of neo-isolationist ideology, or because they see more important issues demanding priority such as preventing nuclear proliferation, dealing with a crumbling Russia, handling relations with a resurgent, yet brittle China, and coping with rogue states and international terrorism.

How to calibrate the resource allocation among all these valid issues is essentially “where it’s at” in twenty-first century American foreign policy.

I don’t pretend to have a simple answer.

But I do think that the inter-agency study I recommended is a necessary first step toward finding an answer.

The Woodrow Wilson Center and this distinguished audience are accustomed to thinking ahead in big terms, and I would welcome your suggestions as we enter the new millennium.

Thank you for your attention.

Today marks the anniversary of an extraordinary event, the 212th anniversary of the birth of the Constitution of the United States. On September 17, 1787, the Constitutional Convention, its work complete, rose and submitted the Constitution to the thirteen states for ratification. Bringing together thirteen different states with diverse cultures and established governments — some of these harking back a hundred years — did not come easy. In 1775, at the time of the Continental Congress, John Adams, writing to his wife, Abigail, described: “‘[f]ifty gentlemen meeting together all strangers . . . not acquainted with each other’s language, ideas, views, designs. They are therefore jealous of each other — fearful, timid, skittish.”

The men who attended that Constitutional Convention knew, even then, that they had begun the greatest political experiment in human history, producing a document that would become an engine of change throughout the world. According to James Madison’s account, Governor Morris of Pennsylvania stated that:

He came here as a Representative of America; he flattered himself he came here in some degree as a Representative of the whole human race; for the whole human race will be affected by the proceedings of this Convention.

“This Country,” Governor Morris continued,

must be united. If persuasion does not unite it, the sword will. . . . The scenes of horror attending civil commotion can not be described . . . . The stronger party will then make [traitors] of the weaker; and the Gallows & Halter will finish the work of the sword.

The Framers, in their vision and wisdom, did unite the country, fashioning a government that was both federal — that is, comprised of sovereign states — and, at the same time, truly national in power. The Framers respected and sustained the essential role of the states. But, at the same time, the Framers made national law supreme, a principle enshrined in the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, and created a government empowered to bind both the states and individuals, powers denied the government under the Articles of Confederation.

The Constitution also established a vigorous and independent presidency — what Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers called “energy in the executive” — by freeing the Chief Executive from selection by the legislature and granting the President real and meaningful powers. As early as McCulloch v. Maryland, Chief Justice John Marshall in 1819 recognized the “great powers” the national government possessed:

to lay and collect taxes; to borrow money; to regulate commerce; to declare and conduct a war; and to raise and support armies and navies. The sword and the purse, all the external relations, and no inconsiderable portion of the industry of the nation, are entrusted to its government.

And, on this 212th anniversary of the crafting of the Constitution — a day and age now marked by national malaise about and distrust of our government and its institutions — it is only fitting to reflect on how right Governor Morris was about how the Framers’ creation has transformed — and transfixed — the human race. Under this Constitution, we settled a vast continent — from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts; we mobilized millions of men to unite the nation and end slavery, fulfilling the promise of the Constitution; we ascended, like the mythical phoenix, from the ashes of the Great Depression; we turned back despotism and preserved a free Europe in two World Wars; we won the Cold War; and we now enjoy economic and military power unrivaled across the globe and unmatched in the history of the world. No small achievements, these.

These achievements make us the envy of the world. Just last week, I returned from a trip to six European countries, including Kosovo, and I met with six Presidents. The President of Bulgaria said to me:

I know of no other country that has risked the lives of its young men and women and would spend $15 billion dollars on behalf of a place in which it has no economic interest, no strategic interest, and no territorial interest — only an interest in defending human rights.

Could we have achieved these successes without vigorous presidential leadership? We owe our position in the world to the choices made by the Framers at the Constitutional Convention. Imagine accomplishing what we have in the two centuries of our brief history without a strong federal government and a strong president.

More than our achievements, though, it is our public institutions that other nations seek to imitate. In every place I traveled around the world last month, every one of those six foreign Presidents talked about how they wanted to mimic American governmental institutions — our Congress, our President, our courts. They do not talk about our resources; they do not talk about the American people themselves; they talk about our institutions. It is these public institutions — not a common ethnicity or religion, which, of course, we do not share — that acts as the glue that binds this country together.

But although other nations clamor to model their institutions after ours, our own public discourse reflects a deep and abiding angst about and suspicion of our government. Last November, only 38 percent of Americans voted, a 50-year low that ranks the United States at or near the bottom of the world’s democracies in voter participation. As of 1995, voter turnout in 14 European countries, by contrast, was above 70 percent.

And take Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s recent book, Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate, which New York Times columnist Frank Rich recently nicknamed “All the Presidents Stink.” Woodward’s book puts between two covers a cynicism about government that you can purchase for fifty cents by picking up a daily newspaper, and for less than that by turning on your television. A style of attack and scandal journalism toward public officials dominates the news media — and studies by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dean of the Annenburg School of Communication and her colleague Joseph Cappella, have shown that cynical coverage breeds cynical voter reactions.

It produces the kinds of expectations what were well captured by Marvin Lucas, a 59-year-old custodial supervisor at a college in Milledgeville, Georgia. Responding to a Washington Post-Kaiser Foundation interviewer, Mr. Lucas said “I compare politicians with used car salesmen: say one thing, do another.”

And the “other thing” that politicians do, of course, is to feather their own nests and the nests of special interest groups that support their reelection campaigns. That is the dominant opinion people have of American elected officials. If that is your starting point, it is no wonder that in 1994, 56 percent of Americans thought that government did more to hinder their family’s achieving the American dream than to help them achieve it, while only 31 percent thought that government helped them. (The numbers had improved by 1997, but were still negative — 47 percent to 38 percent).

Heaven knows that politicians are far from perfect, and our own missteps and, yes, deceptions, contribute to the country’s cynical attitude. Some historians trace the contemporary decline in faith in government to Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 Presidential campaign, where he pledged that “no American boy will fight a foreign war on a foreign soil if I’m elected President.” Within a year of that statement, Johnson had ordered massive increases in draft calls and the military build-up for the Vietnam War. Then Watergate cut right to the heart of our faith in elected officials.

And today, highly negative campaigning has become an art form, as each candidate tries to tag his opponent with being an insider, or else being a corrupt person who just hasn’t had the chance to be corrupt on the inside yet. When Majority Leader George Mitchell was retiring from the Senate, he remarked to Jim Lehrer on the News Hour that so long as campaigns consist of one candidate calling his opponent a crook and the other calling his opponent a scoundrel, is it any wonder that Americans believe that Congress is filled with crooks and scoundrels?

So I don’t want to understate the complexity of the sources of contemporary cynicism and distrust toward elected officials. What worries me, though, is that this cynicism and distrust is way out of proportion to the actual accomplishments of the federal government, and way out of proportion to the sincerity and honesty with which my colleagues conduct themselves every day in doing the country’s business.

This public cynicism is not the only current raging in American politics today, however. There is a movement among intellectuals, historians, and political scientists to shift the locus of political power, or to “devolve power,” from the national government to the states. George Will, one of the champions of this “devolution of power” movement, explained its premise as follows:

[I]t is unwholesome that Washington, like Caesar, has grown so great. Power should flow back to where it came from and belongs, back to the people and their state governments, back to state capitals . . . .

This is nothing less than a fight for the heart and soul of America. This is a fight about power. And it is a fight about who will be left in charge.

In my view, the value of devolution of power from the national government to the states can be overstated. Certainly the abuse of power, whenever it occurs, must be checked. The federal government admittedly does tend to grab power for itself without due regard for whether its goals can better be achieved at the local level. But the state and local governments, in contrast, tend toward parochialism without due regard for the national interest. Thus, devolution of power is not per se a good thing. At whatever level of government, it all depends how that power is used.

It cannot be that the Framers intended to hamstring the federal government in favor of the states. If that was their intent, why abandon the Articles of Confederation? And just try to imagine the United States attaining its successes to date without a strong national government and a vigorous President. To go one step further — imagine how difficult it will be to fortify our position in the world in the 21st century without a powerful central government.

The current cynicism about our public institutions, it seems to me, is also beginning to gain a foothold in the constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court, and that is also of concern to me, and is something I would like to spend the next few minutes discussing with you. Now first I want to say that today’s Supreme Court is the best-informed, hardest working Court we have ever had. In particular, I want to commend Justice Souter, a native son of this great state of New Hampshire, for writing several of the most scholarly and persuasive dissents this Court has seen in recent years — dissents that I am confident will prove prophetic.

Yet the Supreme Court of today embodies both strands of the phenomenon now plaguing our American culture — both the public cynicism about, and the intellectual disdain for, our national government. The Court is sharply critical of the political branches of our federal government, accusing them in case after case this decade of arrogating power to themselves at the expense of state governments. But in assuming the role of “Chief Protector” of the allocation of power between the federal government and the states, the Supreme Court of late has regrettably adopted a court-centered view of the scope of federal power. In doing so, it has arrogated to itself a responsibility that more properly befits the political branches.

In my opinion, we have in the past eight years or so begun to see a series of opinions in which the Supreme Court has become bolder and bolder in stripping the federal government of the ability to make decisions on behalf of the American people. So far, the immediate effects of these decisions are real, but relatively modest. They may represent marginal readjustments in the allocation of power under the Constitution. On the other hand, if I am right and the jurisprudence is being driven by an oversized sense of distrust and cynicism toward democratically elected government — and especially toward the federal government — the decisions could constitute the beginnings of a sea change that could take us quite literally back to a style of judicial imperialism unseen in this country since the early 1930s.

The trio of cases decided by the Supreme Court at the very end of the last Term are a prime example of this court-centered view of federal power. For example, in its 5-4 decision in Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board v. College Savings Bank, the Court held that Congress had no power to subject the states to private patent infringement suits in federal court because in the Court’s view, the statute was not “appropriate” legislation to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court said no to patent infringement cases against state entities because the Court — not Congress — decided that legislation remedying patent infringement by state entities was not really necessary. In so deciding, the Court made a quintessentially legislative judgment.

To the same effect was the companion case, College Savings Bank v. Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board, in which the Court dismissed out of hand Congress’ effort to hold state entities accountable to private parties for misrepresenting the states’ commercial products in violation of federal trademark law, because the Court decided that the statute did not protect “property rights” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The two Florida Prepaid decisions unfortunately flow directly from City of Boerne v. Flores, in which the Court in 1997 struck down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as also exceeding Congress’ authority under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In ruling that Congress had gone too far in protecting religious liberty, the Court in essence held that Congress had not done its homework to the Court’s satisfaction. The Court attacked the legislative record as lacking what it considered to be sufficient modern instances of religious bigotry and found that the statute was “out of proportion” to its supposed remedial or preventive objects. Again, the Court in effect decided that a law simply was not really necessary.

Implicit in the Court’s obvious willingness in Boerne to second-guess Congress’ legislative judgment in the name of protecting state governments is the notion that it is for the Supreme Court, and not Congress, to specify the meaning of the provisions of the Constitution, even when Congress claims to enforce the individual liberties protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

It is as if the Court has forgotten that the only institution mentioned in section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment is Congress. The text of section 5 is clear and simple: “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” It was for Congress, not the courts, to be the primary guarantor of individual rights as against oppression by state authorities, and for Congress, not the courts, to assess whether and what legislation is needed for that purpose. Remember that the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in the long shadow of the Dred Scott decision. The court-centered view the Court has since taken of that amendment is directly at odds with the universal sentiment at the time of its adoption that it was our federal legislature, not the courts, that could best be trusted to police the states.

What seems to lie at the heart of the headline-grabbing cases of the past few terms is the Court’s willingness to disregard the views of Congress in favor of its own. It is as if the Court believes that it has a better sense of the economic and other real-world implications of the laws Congress passes than do those elected by the people to serve in that branch.

The Court’s recent decisions contain troubling echoes from the New Deal era, when the Supreme Court was swift to substitute its own judgment of what was desirable economic legislation for that of Congress and the President. Here is just one illustration from that bygone era: In Railroad Retirement Board v. Alton Railroad Co., the Court in 1935 struck down the Railroad Retirement Act as unconstitutional, in part because the Court concluded that it was not a valid regulation of interstate commerce. Congress enacted the statute, which established a compulsory retirement and pension system for all railroad carriers, to promote “efficiency and safety in interstate transportation” both by reducing the aging population of employees and by improving the employees’ sense of security and morale. In its opinion, the Court stated, however: “We cannot agree that these ends . . . encourage loyalty and continuity of service.” We cannot agree. That is a breathtaking statement by a court which had abandoned its proper role. WE CANNOT AGREE?

And in denying Congress what Justice Breyer in dissent has called “necessary legislative flexibility,” such as to create, for example, “a decentralized system of individual private remedies,” the Court has returned to the kind of court-centered conception of federal power that typified not only the New Deal era, but the Lochner era as well. As Justice Souter predicted in his Alden v. Maine dissent lamenting the Court’s sovereign immunity decisions:

The resemblance of today’s state sovereign immunity to the Lochner era’s industrial due process is striking. The Court began this century by imputing immutable constitutional status to a conception of economic self-reliance that was never true to industrial life and grew insistently fictional with the years, and the Court has chosen to close the century by conferring like status on a conception of state sovereign immunity that is true neither to history nor to the structure of the Constitution. I expect the Court’s latest essay into immunity doctrine will prove the equal of its earlier experiment in laissez-faire, the one being as unrealistic as the other, as indefensible, and probably as fleeting.

(Justice Souter, I sincerely hope that you are correct when you said “probably as fleeting” because if you are wrong, and the Court’s pronouncements endure, then I am afraid that the country is in bigger trouble than I thought.)

Don’t misunderstand me. I do not mean for a second to disparage the role of the states. The states play a critical part in warding off tyranny by the national government and in performing all the fundamental functions with which the governments closest to the people are charged. Certainly those of you who live in this great state of New Hampshire — whose motto is “Live Free or Die” — understand that better than anyone else. As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers:

The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

But we should think long and hard before allowing one branch of our government — the federal judiciary — to cripple its co-equal branches, the political branches, of government. To do so is to put in jeopardy all that we have accomplished in our brief history and all that we may do in the future.

I must tell you that I am gravely concerned about the direction the Court is headed. I have a particular stake in this which I will confess now and that is the fate of the civil rights remedy created by the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, which I wrote. Earlier this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit invalidated the civil rights remedy in Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, and the case may come before the Supreme Court in the coming Term if the Court grants review.

The civil rights remedy creates a new federal cause of action allowing a victim of gender-motivated violence to sue her attacker in court. I believe — indeed, I know — that violence against women restricts the participation of women in the national economy, inhibits their production and consumption of goods and services in interstate commerce, and obstructs their ability to work and travel freely. In short, violence against women was, and is, a national problem of epic proportions that substantially and adversely affects interstate commerce. A massive legislative record compiled after four years of fact-finding hearings in Congress irrefutably confirms the impact of violence against women on the national economy and interstate commerce.

When we enacted the Violence Against Women Act civil rights remedy in 1994, the Senate Judiciary Committee explicitly found that the provision satisfied the “modest threshold” required by the Commerce Clause, and we in Congress were confident of the statute’s constitutionality. The civil rights remedy quite appropriately attempted to remove an obstruction to interstate commerce, much as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred race discrimination in hotels and restaurants because such discrimination, as the Court put it in upholding the statute, “imposed ‘an artificial restriction on the market.’”

But less than a year after we enacted the Violence Against Women Act and its civil rights remedy, the Supreme Court decided United States v. Lopez and invalidated, as beyond Congress’ Commerce Clause authority, the Gun-Free School Zones Act, which prohibited the possession of a firearm within 1000 feet of a school. In the wake of Lopez, I find myself asking: Will this Court accept the congressional judgment that violence against women adversely affects the national economy? Or will this Court second-guess the remedy we chose to address that effect?

Ironically, the Court may find itself the champion of states’ rights that the states do not even want. Just as with the Patent Remedy Act, where no state testified in favor of immunity from private patent infringement actions, the vast majority of states strongly favor the Violence Against Women Act civil rights remedy. Forty-one state attorneys general wrote to Congress in favor of the statute, including the civil rights remedy, before its enactment. Only a few weeks ago, 33 Attorneys General submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court asking the Court to grant the petition for certiorari and uphold the statute because the states “agree with Congress that gender-based violence substantially affects interstate commerce and the States cannot address this problem adequately by themselves.”

I also fear that the Supreme Court’s readiness to disregard the people’s judgment has served as a clarion call to the federal courts to usher in what Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has called the “Constitution in Exile.” According to Judge Ginsburg, the doctrine of enumerated powers, the nondelegation doctrine, the Necessary and Proper, Contracts, Takings, and Commerce clauses, had become “ancient exiles, banished for standing in opposition to unlimited government.”

In service of this “Constitution-in-Exile,” the lower courts have begun to read the Constitution in a revolutionary way. Thus, a district court in Alabama decided, remarkably, that the Superfund amendments were unconstitutional because they did not regulate interstate commerce, a decision later reversed on appeal. Similarly, the Fourth Circuit’s ruling striking down the civil rights remedy of the Violence Against Women Act transforms Lopez v. United States from an important reminder that Congress’ commerce power is not without limits, into what is arguably the most momentous decision of the last fifty years regarding the scope of federal power.

That same court of appeals has tightened the noose in yet another way. The Fourth Circuit ruled last year in Condon v. Reno, a case now under review by the Supreme Court, that Congress may not pass a law when that law applies only to the states, and not also to private individuals. In other words, Congress may not require the states to comply with federal law if the law does not also affect private individuals.

The jury is still out on whether the Supreme Court will let the other shoe drop and sustain these additional restrictions on federal power, but the Court seems primed and poised to do so. Much hangs in the balance. If your eyes glaze over when I speak about Congress authorizing private actions for patent infringement or trademark violations by state entities, then think about the Fair Labor Standards Act, which the Court held last June in Alden v. Maine could not be enforced against noncompliant states by state employees seeking backpay. How far we have come from the Framers’ vision of a federal government strong enough and flexible enough to do the people’s business. As Justice Souter observed in his dissent in Alden v. Maine:

Had the question been posed, state sovereign immunity could not have been thought to shield a State from suit under federal law on a subject committed to national jurisdiction by Article I of the Constitution.

Other cases could potentially serve as a resounding wake-up call as to the extent to which the federal government’s hands have been tied in addressing problems of national import. In the coming Term, the Court will take up the question whether the Congress had the power in the Age Discrimination in Employment Act to authorize private law suits against state violators. A case raising a similar issue with respect to the Americans with Disabilities Act is sure to follow. And if the Court says no, private individuals who suffer age, disability, and other forms of discrimination at the hands of state actors will have few means at their disposal to enforce their rights under federal law, and the federal government will rarely be able to help them.

The Court left open the possibility that the federal government could sue noncompliant states, but if you think that it is realistic for the federal government to come to the rescue by going into court on a regular basis to vindicate the federal rights of private individuals, think again. I do not see a massive expansion of the federal litigating corps happening any time soon. Nor do I see how that could be anything but self-defeating if the goal is to minimize the federal intrusion into state government affairs. By elevating the states’ sovereign immunity to an immutable principle of constitutional law, the Court, as Justice Breyer recognized in his College Savings Bank dissent:

makes it more difficult for Congress to decentralize governmental decisionmaking and to provide individual citizens, or local communities, with a variety of enforcement powers. By diminishing congressional flexibility to do so, the Court makes it somewhat more difficult to satisfy modern federalism’s more important liberty-protecting needs. In this sense, it is counterproductive.

Now don’t get me wrong. Sometimes the federal and state governments do not get their relationship quite right. We do not have infallible institutions. But when the Supreme Court restricts the flexibility of Congress to decide how best to address national problems within the scope of its enumerated powers, the Court truncates the learning process otherwise underway in our political institutions — a result a conservative court — conservative with a small “c” — should hesitate to effect.

The Court has imposed by fiat limitations on the exercise of federal power that might very well have come about without the Court’s interference. In other words, the Court in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority got it right when, in 1985, it overruled National League of Cities v. Usery, a case decided a decade earlier, that had restricted the federal government’s power to regulate the states “in areas of traditional governmental functions.” Instead, the Court announced in Garcia that the political process, not the Court, should serve as the principal check on federal overreaching. I must disagree with the notion that leaving it to Congress and the President is like leaving the fox to guard the chicken coop, or as Justice O’Connor put it in her dissent in Garcia, like leaving the “essentials of state sovereignty” to Congress’ “underdeveloped capacity for self-restraint.”

The Violence Against Women Act civil rights remedy is a good example of Congress’ developing capacity for self-restraint. At the outset, those most concerned about domestic violence and rape wanted a statute with a broad sweep, and so we started out by introducing a provision in 1990 that arguably would have federalized a significant portion of state laws against domestic violence and rape. But the Conference of Chief Justices of State Supreme Courts, the Judicial Conference of the United States — and Chief Justice Rehnquist, in particular — pointed out to Congress, while the bill was under consideration, that the civil rights provision might significantly interfere with the states’ handling of domestic relations and rape cases, while at the same time, overburdening the federal courts. The federal and state judiciaries raised the concern, we examined it, and we decided that they were right. Congress then carefully redrafted the civil rights remedy so that it would not have that effect.

There are other recent examples — such as the Unfunded Mandates Act — that came about because the states complained to Congress that we were forcing them to use their tax dollars to do whatever we mandated in Washington. The states staged a mini-rebellion. So Congress wrote a new law requiring federal restraint. And for that, I must give my Republican colleagues their due.

But when the Supreme Court plays traffic cop on the streets of federalism, the Court does our country a disservice by cutting this national political dialogue short. We are already reaching many of the conclusions the Court has now cemented into the Constitution. James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers that the new federal government would be sufficiently national and local in spirit as “to be disinclined to invade the rights of the individual States, or the prerogatives of their governments.” Our political institutions can be trusted. The Framers understood this.

In short, the disconnect between our public and cultural perceptions of our institutions and reality is stunning. Keep in mind that the rest of the world is struggling to emulate our institutions because they believe it is our institutions that separate us from other nations — indeed, from other democracies — and are the bedrock upon which our successes are founded.

Yet our public discourse, our legal opinions, our very culture, are compelling us to overlook or scorn our own accomplishments. We are losing, as a nation, the communal notion that our strength lies in our institutions. Relentlessly accentuating the negative when it comes to our political institutions, however, eclipses our considerable successes. And this predilection to distrust the political branches now seems to be shared equally by the judicial branch, not only when it comes time to decide how to distribute power between the federal government and the states, but also when it comes to making a judgment of what is in the best interests of Americans.

I talked to you tonight about cynicism, devolution of power, and how we got here. In my view, all of that can be overcome by the right leadership, the right people in power, who will recharge the public’s imagination and confidence. The public mood can be transformed in an election, a single cycle. Maybe it will take a generation. But it can be changed. Elected officials who cater too much or too little to state interests can be voted out of office. But if the Supreme Court chisels into stone new constitutional restrictions on federal power, new hoops through which Congress must leap, where will we be then? You cannot go to the polls to undo a constitutional ruling of the Supreme Court. There is no further appeal — no appeal to a higher court, no appeal to the voters. Nothing short of a new constitutional convention or an amendment to the Constitution — and you know how easy that is — or will do. James Madison was right: trust the political process. “WE CANNOT AGREE”? Please.

Let me conclude by making the following simple point: if, at the federal level, we are such a failure institutionally, why does the rest of the world look to us to copy our supposed frailties? If we are such a failure — with our last six Presidents supposedly flops — how is that our incomes are actually growing, crime is going down, drug use is down, and our economy is in better shape than that of any nation in the history of the world? How did we produce a nation willing and able, as the President of Bulgaria pointed out, to spend billions of dollars and risk the lives of its men and women to advance the cause of human rights? Did it happen by chance? Did it happen by accident? It happened as a direct result of our unique political institutions.

The Framers set out to create a centralized government robust enough to deal with national problems, but with built-in guarantees that it be respectful of, and sensitive to, local concerns. There is an inherent tension in the document. But look at the sweep of history: as the balance of power has shifted back and forth between the national government and the states, our resilient political branches have adjusted and responded. The rest of the world gets it.

We must remember that politics — and politicians — are not the enemy. The Constitutional Convention was composed of men who were regarded as gifted even in their own day. As the French chargé d’affaires wrote to his government as the Convention convened:

If all the delegates named for this Convention at Philadelphia are present, we will never have seen, even in Europe, an assembly more respectable for the talents, knowledge, disinterestedness, and patriotism of those who compose it.

Above all else, these men were politicians. And I am not suggesting by this that our government today boasts the likes of a Jefferson or a Madison, but I am suggesting that we have fine and decent men and women with significant capabilities who choose public service. And some of you are among them.

The hostility we see from the Supreme Court toward the elected branches of government is the same suspicion we see in the eyes of the ordinary person on the street. “Politics” has become a dirty word. But as those of you here who live in this state of strong local community governments and town hall meetings, know better than anyone, “politics” is fundamental to how we govern ourselves in a democracy. At the end of the day, politics is the only way a community can govern itself and realize its goals without the sword.

So I stand before you today, on this 212th anniversary of the completion of the work of the Constitutional Convention, ready and willing to defend politics — even national politics. It was what those 50 gentlemen, all strangers, who met 212 years ago defended and vindicated. And it is what, in the end, has made and will continue to make us secure and strong.