With articles of impeachment stemming from Clinton's false testimony about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, the House launched into an intense, bitterly partisan floor debate on December 18, 1998, a day before formally voting. Republican leaders pressed the case that Clinton's conduct constituted lying under oath and obstructing justice, while Democrats decried the proceedings as a partisan vendetta, setting the stage for only the second presidential impeachment vote in American history.
The debate unfolded in an unusually charged atmosphere, days after House Speaker-designate Bob Livingston had abruptly announced his own resignation over an extramarital affair, undercutting Republican moral authority even as they pressed impeachment charges against Clinton for lying about his affair with a White House intern. Tempers flared on the floor as members shouted over procedural objections and traded accusations of hypocrisy and political theater.
Clinton, meanwhile, was simultaneously overseeing American airstrikes against Iraq (Operation Desert Fox), a coincidence that fueled Republican accusations he was using military action to distract from impeachment, charges the White House vehemently denied. The juxtaposition of bombs falling on Baghdad and lawmakers debating a president's personal conduct produced one of the stranger 48-hour stretches in modern American political history.
The following day's vote would make Clinton only the second U.S. president impeached, after Andrew Johnson in 1868, though the Senate would ultimately acquit him in February 1999. December 18's debate captured the raw partisan fracture that the Lewinsky scandal had exposed, previewing divisions in American politics that many historians see as a precursor to the deeper polarization of the following decades.