Bloody week on Capitol Hill

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 12, 1998 | by Jamie Dettmer

The fight for President Bill Clinto's future has been joined, but the battle lines are unclear. Washington waits for Democrats to abandon Clinton and for perhaps more damning evidence.

History when written appears so orderly. Something happens -- there are consequences. Chroniclers condense, and everything seems predetermined. Nothing was so neat on Capitol Hill in the week after Independent Counsel Ken Starr dropped his excoriating report on the president's "inappropriate relationship" with Monica Lewinsky.

As lawmakers grappled with their consciences, made political calculations and struggled with legal definitions of what constitutes impeachable "high crimes and misdemeanors" all was confusion, misdirection and anarchy.

As the lanky Louisiana Republican Bob Livingston put it: "Rome may not be burning but Nero sure is fiddling."

"We are in a government shutdown," Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays told a pack of reporters as he left the floor of the House. "We just have not officially recognized it yet."

When Starr's report hit the Internet the nation had reeled and gone into shock. So too had lawmakers -- Democrat and Republican. They haven't come out of it yet as they face the grim prospect of presiding over the departure in disgrace of yet another president.

Battle lines were not always clear and they remain meandering, cutting across the trenches of partisanship. To impeach the president or not? How to proceed? Will the procedure inexorably dictate the outcome? What will be the electoral consequences? Should Congress follow the opinion polls or lead? Such questions were asked of lawmakers ad nauseam, and only a handful were certain of their answers.

Most lawmakers were indecisive about the larger question of impeachment, though they were happy to engage, argue and sometimes even rage with each other about whether videotape of the president's grandjury material should be released.

Floor debates and committee hearings on subjects unconnected with Starr continued. There were House resolutions calling on Clinton to renegotiate extradition arrangements with Mexico and congratulating baseball star Mark McGwire for breaking the single-season home-run record. And there were bills too -- including one to rename a U.S. Postal Service facility in Philadelphia.

It was surreal, and the legislative mind was elsewhere.

The talk in the Speaker's Lobby, in the restaurants on Capitol Hill and in savvy watering holes such as the Monocle was of only one thing: What to do about President Clinton.

But some themes did come through the week of confusion. Fearful for their political futures in the upcoming midterm elections in November, Democrats distanced themselves from the president.

Another theme revolved around the widespread fear on Capitol Hill that the Clinton White House may play tougher than did Richard Nixon in the throes of Watergate and leak private-eye FBI dirt on lawmakers -- the infamous scorched-earth strategy first described here in detail. "Everyone is talking about it," remarked a senior GOP aide.

That fear mounted when the liberal on-line magazine Salon revealed that the respected Judiciary Committee chairman Henry Hyde, 74, had an extramarital affair in the 1960s. Ironically, in a bid to pre-empt any thinly-veiled White House threats of retaliation from being acted upon, Hyde had issued to all panel members 24 hours before the expose a memorandum warning that investigations of members with intent to influence the outcome of the committee's deliberations would constitute obstruction of Congress, a serious criminal offense.

Monday: Piled up on a table in the Speaker's Lobby is House resolution 304, "expressing the sense of the Congress regarding the culpability of Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes ... in the former Yugoslavia." Returning from the weekend, even narcissistic lawmakers are preoccupied with someone else's culpability and what they are meant to do about it.

The "pornographic" nature of sections of the Starr report is still infuriating many Democratic members, but their anger with the independent counsel for what they see as "piling on" and purposely humiliating the president is offset by their horror at Clinton's behavior and his 9 months of lying to them.

Privately, there is fury in Democratic ranks. Among black Democratic women some of that is prompted by Clinton's exploitation of the loyalty of his African-American personal secretary, Betty Currie, who Washington wags cruelly have dubbed "Madame Currie" for her role in facilitating and disguising the president's sex encounters with Lewinsky.

According to the Start report, at one point Currie, by all accounts a dignified woman of high moral values, was reduced to loitering for 15 minutes in the Oval Office pantry while the president and Lewinsky concluded their business in his private study. The ever-loyal Currie wanted to walk out with Monica so no one would realize Clinton had been alone with the young trainee. "That really infuriates me," says a black female lawmaker in Speaker's Lobby. "Really, really, really."