The following is a statement from the Senate’s closed deliberations on the Articles of Impeachment against President Clinton, excerpts of which senators were allowed to publish in the Congressional Record for Friday, February 12, 1999.
Senator Richard Lugar was a Republican senator from Indiana. He served from 1977 until 2013.
Statement by Senator Richard Lugar (Republican – Indiana)
Mr. Chief Justice, for the first time in 120 years, and only for the second time in U.S. history, the Senate is about to conclude a Presidential impeachment trial. Our Founding Fathers viewed the power to remove a President as a necessary constitutional safeguard, but they wanted to make certain that the process was sufficiently difficult that the will of the voters would be overturned only for the gravest of reasons. They wrote the words ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ as a threshold, but left it to us to determine what transgressions met this standard. All of us have endeavored to fulfill this enormous responsibility.