Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [418]
Robert Dove, the nonpartisan Senate parliamentarian, was assigned to work out the details. A political scientist from Iowa who had advised senators of both parties for decades, Dove was an intellectually sharp man with the friendly manner of Burl Ives. He was viewed as a person absolutely loyal to the Senate as an institution. He understood that in sharp contrast to their colleagues in the House, senators of neither party seemed eager to detonate this impeachment bomb. Most feared that the trial would gobble up months of time that had been allocated for pressing legislative matters and that would wreck their own agendas.
Dove, who interacted daily with senators of both parties, recalled that the general sense among them, save for a few highly partisan members, was, “How does the Senate, in effect, stiff the House?” He added, “There was very much a sense of giving a payback.” Senators felt as if they had “been had” by their colleagues in the lower chamber. The prevailing opinion was, “The House had done this to the Senate, and the Senate was going to do it back to the House. The president was almost an afterthought.”
The senators understood that a successful trial could not possibly work from a one-sided, “partisan basis.” Convicting a federal official required a vote of two-thirds of the senators; experience had shown that a divided Senate would never accomplish this feat. “The impeachments [of federal judges] that had happened in the 1980s had been overwhelmingly bipartisan,” explained Dove. “The assumption was that that’s how an impeachment worked.”
As Christmas break vanished in a wintry blur, Trent Lott explored a proposal to wrap up the impeachment trial in as few as six days. Dubbed the “Gorton-Lieberman plan”—for Senators Slade Gorton, a Republican from Washington, and Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat from Connecticut—this proposal called for a quick trial without any witnesses or additional testimony. The record would be “reviewed, read, [and] presented” by the House managers, and a vote taken.
Strong conservative senators like Republican Whip Don Nickles of Oklahoma and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania mocked this plan, calling it pusillanimous and saying it would let Clinton off the hook too easily. So Lott’s own team scotched the idea before they had even returned from the holiday break. Lott would later express regret that it had been derailed. “Sometimes, a leader makes a decision and starts going down the trail; he looks back and the troops are not there, …” the Mississippi senator explained. “Do you keep going forward? No. You say, ‘Okay. That was one proposal. Let’s try something else.’”
A variety of censure proposals were being floated as trial balloons. Most of these were popping on impact in the chilly atmosphere. Even the White House lawyers were ambivalent. David Kendall, for one, thought it was “better to duke it out” than to agree to some “nasty censure motion” that would rebuke the president and open the door for later criminal prosecution by Starr. The feeling inside the White House was, “We had the cards. We were concerned with the historical record. Censure was a device in lieu of impeachment… it was too late.” On the other hand, anything seemed better than going to trial and risking Clinton’s removal from office, especially since a core group of deeply conservative Republicans seemed to view Clinton as “the Spawn of Satan” and wanted to remove him at all costs.
Kendall and White House Counsel Charles Ruff paid a courtesy call on Chairman Hyde at his Capitol Hill office, to determine if a compromise might be feasible. The chairman, famous for smoking long, odoriferous cigars, pulled out a fistful of stogies from a humidor and offered them to his guests. Kendall, a lapsed cigar smoker,