The Week - impeachment background, other political items

* It is indeed the case that Sen. Trent Lott and Rep. Bob Barr have made a practice of addressing a group focused on white self-interest and white power. One day, if this kind of thing spreads, we may have a Congressional Black Caucus.

* The reasons for calling witnesses before the Senate have to do with law, theater, and propriety. This is a legal process. A judge presides. The senators have sworn oaths (more sincerely, one hopes, than Bill Clinton). Matters of fact as well as of law and politics are on the table, and key testimony has been vague or contradictory. It requires examination. Why did the president give the State of the Union address in person? To make an effect. For the same reason, the key figures in this case should appear in the flesh, not in ring binders. The effect they may have is unpredictable. The sleek Vernon Jordan, the un-sleek Betty Currie, might invoke respect or pity. But many of the House managers are former prosecutors, and many of the senators are lawyers, capable of seeing through evasive testimony-so long as they can see it. Can the Senate afford not to hear witnesses in this case? Senators hear from all kinds of people-number crunchers, tobacco executives, no- minees to the Corporation for Public Broad- casting. They should indeed question those whose testimony may bring down a president.

* In the February American Spectator, Byron York writes, in effect, an extended brief for calling Jordan. In a painstaking dissection of Jordan's grand-jury testimony, York demonstrates how Jordan's account is contradicted by Lewinsky's more believable-and more often corroborated-testimony on important matters like whether Jordan helped her prepare her affidavit denying a sexual relationship with the president and whether he advised her to throw away possible evidence of an affair. Jordan's testimony is shot through with laughable cover stories and memory lapses. He maintains that a lunch with Bruce Lindsey the day Matt Drudge broke the Lewinsky story had to do with Lindsey's post-White House career plans. Jordan recalls nothing about a frenzied flurry of calls to the White House and Lewinsky the next day. Before it renders a judgment in the Lewinsky case, the Senate should try to jog his memory.

* Picking up where Barney Frank left off in the House, Iowa senator Tom Harkin has made himself the court jester of the Senate impeachment trial. After taking an oath to judge the case impartially, and before hearing the presentations of House managers, Harkin pronounced the case against the president a "pile of dung." Then, he rose during the proceeding to object to the idea that senators are just "jurors"- instead of "judges and jurors"-in the trial. Harkin is correct, of course, but his motivation is clearly to prepare the ground for jury nullification in the Senate. "We are not just triers of fact and law," Harkin explained. Translation: "We can ignore the facts and law." Asked on one TV program whether the president committed grand-jury perjury, Harkin maintained, "I have seen no evidence, and there is no specific allegation." But Harkin has seen no evidence because he-like many other Democrats-doesn't want to look. Confronted with a "pile of dung" of the president's creation, he is determined simply to avert his eyes.

* Harkin, together with Sen. Paul Wellstone (D., Minn.), is pushing to make public the Senate's final deliberations on the president's removal. This departure from the Senate's rules would require a two- thirds vote to pass, so it probably won't happen-nor should it. The case for public deliberations is superficially appealing-openness, sunshine, C-SPAN, etc.-but TV cameras encourage grandstanding, while a private session would give senators the freedom to grapple with the case without worrying about partisan appearances. This is why Harkin the partisan favors deliberations broadcast on CNN, while Sen. Robert Byrd (D., W.V.), who takes his constitutional duties much more seriously, favors privacy. Just as good fences make good neighbors, in this case closed doors will make better senators.

* The historian Jakob Burckhardt called Pietro Aretino, the Renaissance blackmailer and pornographer, the "father of modern journalism." But did he think Aretino would be the permanent standard? Meet Larry Flynt. Flynt, whose regular fare runs to women oozing out of meat grinders, and less savory stuff, has decided to go political, and why not? James Carville, who accused Paula Jones of being "trailer-park trash," is happy to be his friend. The Clinton White House, which condemns the impeachment process as being just "about sex," is his beneficiary. All the feminists, from Gloria Steinem to Nina Burleigh, who found Bill Clinton's sexcapades trivial, or even his just deserts, are now his soulmates. Embracing Flynt as a standard-bearer proclaims, as it commits, vileness. Larry Flynt is offal on wheels. Enjoy your ally.

* Remember the "peace dividend"? The debate over how to spend money no longer needed for the Cold War? Now the debate has shifted to the budget surplus: whether to splurge on, oh, free false teeth or return it to the people who earned it and sent it to Washington in the first place. Congressional Republicans came down firmly in the latter camp when they proposed a 10 percent cut in the income tax. The reduction would apply to all brackets, which is smart politics as well as sound policy, as support for the GOP among the over-75-grand-a-year set has been slipping. Republicans should do their utmost to pass their plan and plunk it on Bill Clinton's desk, forcing him to veto it or gulp it down. One disappointing note: Pete Domenici, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, is touting former Howard Baker aide Dan Crippen to head the Congressional Budget Office. Crippen is not expected to change the CBO's practice, in predicting revenues, of positing that tax cuts will have no effect on growth. Domenici cannot advance his party's initiative by assuming at the outset that it will fail.