The celebrated historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., assuring a House Judiciary subcommittee on Nov. 9 that Congress cannot constitutionally impeach President Clinton for his ”disgraceful” lies, distilled the essence of his scholarly advice into one short sentence: ”Gentlemen always lie about their sex lives.”

Always. Even when ordered by a judge to answer a sexual harassment plaintiff’s questions under oath. Even to a criminal grand jury. Even when the lie falsely brands as a liar and a head case the lady whose reputation the gentleman presumably wishes to protect.

It also appears that sex is not the only thing about which gentlemen lie–or, let’s say (after all, we’re all gentlemen here), fib. Sometimes they fib about history.

Consider the press release issued on Oct. 28 by Schlesinger and two other eminent co-sponsors on behalf of more than 400 (mostly liberal) historians and constitutional scholars. It contained just one assertion of historical fact: ”Under our Constitution, impeachment of the president is . . . explicitly reserved . . . for high crimes and misdemeanors in the exercise of executive power.”

False. The Constitution specifies no such thing. The last six words quoted above–”in the exercise of executive power”– appear nowhere in any of the provisions regarding impeachment. Nor do they appear in any of the records of the constitutional convention. Nor was the impeachment power ever construed so narrowly by leading scholars before 1998, when liberals mobilized to palliate President Clinton’s perjuries and alleged obstruction of justice.

Indeed, Schlesinger’s own 1973 book, The Imperial Presidency, noted that ”the continuation of a lawbreaker as chief magistrate would be a strange way to exemplify law and order at home or to demonstrate American probity abroad.” He suggested that President Nixon could be impeached if proven guilty of ”knowing violation of the Constitution or knowing involvement in the obstruction of justice” (emphasis added).

The question presents itself: Would Schlesinger and all those other liberal scholars be opposing impeachment as unconstitutional if the president accused of perjury and obstruction of justice in a sexual harassment lawsuit and in a grand jury proceeding was a conservative Republican? What do you think?

The transparent hypocrisy of many of the concerned scholars should not, of course, obscure the apparent sincerity of the few who seem genuinely to believe that the Constitution implicitly limits the grounds for impeachment to major abuses of official power. Indeed, the Constitution’s language and history do show that the impeachment clauses were designed mainly to deal with such abuses. And anyway, public opinion–unless it changes– will and should eventually trump the views of those (including me) who want Clinton removed from office for his pattern of lying and lawlessness. The Senate will not vote to remove Clinton as long as he remains popular. Nor should it: It would be of dubious constitutional legitimacy for Congress to take such a drastic step if the public–after Congress has fully and formally aired the evidence and arguments–remains opposed.

But Congress has not yet aired the evidence. The House Judiciary Committee’s job now is to confront the ugly facts, and their legal implications, as honestly, as carefully, and as publicly as possible. It would be a cowardly abdication to cut a furtive censure deal now merely because most voters so far seem content to keep in office a president they don’t trust or respect as a person.

One of the reasons for the House to press ahead is to correct a record that is now polluted by the mass of deceptions, distortions, and ”sophistries,” in House Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde’s apt word, put forth by the president’s apologists– on the facts, on the law, and on the history of impeachment.

Take the assertion at the Nov. 9 hearing by Michigan’s John Conyers, the House Judiciary Committee’s senior Democrat, that Clinton could not be guilty of perjury because ”the government does not have the legal power to ask” the kinds of ”questions about sex” that were put to him by Paula Jones’ lawyers and Kenneth Starr’s prosecutors.

Yet, it has been established law for years that in civil suits alleging sexual harassment, both private plaintiffs and the government do have the power to ask questions about sex. While some (including me) have argued for amending the law to protect privacy interests, Conyers has advocated no such step, which would outrage liberal feminists. Instead, he seeks to put the president–at least as long as the president is a Democrat–above the laws that others must obey.

Some other scholars at the Nov. 9 hearing, such as professor Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School, made a barely plausible case for a narrow view of the impeachment power. Sunstein’s best point was that ”the exceptional infrequency of serious impeachment proceedings against the president . . . suggests a historical understanding that impeachment is appropriate only in th e most extraordinary cases of abuse of distinctly presidential authority.”

Perhaps, but it’s also almost ”unique in the history of the presidency” (to borrow Schlesinger’s description of Nixon’s crimes) for a president to be caught committing a succession of calculated, serious federal crimes. And in my view, the nine scholars (at least three of whom are Democrats) that the Republican majority called as witnesses had much the better of the 10-hour constitutional and historical argument with the anti- impeachment scholars called by the Democrats.

Consider the claims by anti-impeachment scholars that the constitutional phrase ”treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” suggests that the ”other high crimes and misdemeanors” must necessarily be limited to abuses of presidential power. ”When a president is bribed,” a few hundred (again, largely liberal) law professors contended in a Nov. 4 letter opposing impeachment, ”he exercises or offers to exercise his executive powers in exchange for corrupt gain.”

But suppose the president is not the bribee but the briber? Professor Richard Parker of Harvard Law School (a self- described populist Democrat) posed that question in his testimony, pointing out that the president could surely be impeached if, for example, he had bribed the judge, or a witness, in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit. That would involve no abuse of Clinton’s official powers.

Impeachment is clearly a proper remedy for the ”high crime” of criminally attacking the integrity of the judicial process through bribery. ”What is the difference,” Parker asked, ”between that and lying under oath or obstructing justice in the same judicial proceeding–to say nothing of before a federal grand jury–for the same purpose?”

Contrary to the anti-impeachment scholars’ efforts to construe ”high crimes and misdemeanors” as strictly limited to a discrete category of ”official” crimes foreseen by the Framers, it was pointed out at the Nov. 9 hearing that a widely acclaimed 1974 staff report for the House Judiciary Committee’s then-Democratic majority had stressed that ”the scope of impeachment was not viewed narrowly” by the Framers, who ”adopted from English history a standard sufficiently general and flexible to meet future circumstances and events, the nature and character of which they could not foresee.”

This standard, the report said, included not only abuses of executive power, and not merely crimes such as treason and bribery, but also ”behaving in a manner grossly incompatible with the proper function and purpose of the office.”

Perhaps this is all beside the point. After all, it seems that every time Clinton is caught in another lie or another crime, his poll ratings float higher. In this regard, the most evocative moment at the Nov. 9 hearing came when Republicans played some videotape from the Judiciary Committee’s proceedings against President Nixon in July 1974, including a statement by Democrat James Mann of South Carolina.

”I wonder,” Mann said, ”if the people still do want their elected representatives to fulfill their oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Do you want us to exercise the duty and responsibility of the power of impeachment, whether that means conviction or exculpation? You know, some of the things that cause me to wonder are the phrase that keeps coming back to me, ‘Ah, it’s just politics.’ Or ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’ ”Are we so morally bankrupt that we would accept a past course of wrongdoing or that we would decide that the system that we have is incapable of sustaining a system of law because we aren’t perfect?”