Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [421]
Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, one of the oldest and most revered members of the body at age eighty-one, told his colleagues, according to notes taken at the meeting: “The White House has sullied itself. The House has fallen into the black pit of partisan self-indulgence. The Senate is teetering on the brink of that same black pit.”
Just as there seemed to be no hope of finding a way out, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas (an ardent Republican) and Senator Ted Kennedy (a die-hard Democrat) abruptly stood up “and proposed that the two of them, they thought, could work [things] out.” As one observer recalled, the clear implication of their words was “this was not going to be months; this was going to be weeks and perhaps not that many weeks.” Gramm was a tough-nosed Texan famous for bashing wimpy liberals. Kennedy was the poster child for left-wing Democratic causes. Suddenly senators began pounding their desks, shouting “Here! Here!” and “Seal the deal!” According to one individual who witnessed this remarkable coming-together, “the two men walked down into the middle of the Old Senate Chamber shaking hands, and the reaction was, if those two senators can get together, the rest of us could follow along.”
Trent Lott later explained that the Gramm-Kennedy “compromise” was nothing more than an agreement to agree. As senators filed out of the historic room at the end of the night, they whispered to Lott, “Well, what was [the deal]?” All Lott could reply was, “Don’t worry, Gramm and Kennedy are on the same page.”
The next day, the offices of both sides were flooded with calls, constituents demanding to know, “How could Senator Ted Kennedy join with Phil Gramm on anything?… Obviously, this is an outrageous sellout!”
Amid the howling in their own caucuses, the senators quietly worked to clarify the terms of the ambiguous nondeal. One key aspect of the Senate pact was that there would be no additional evidence permitted. The record in the Senate would be limited to “what the record was in the House. Nothing else.” Essentially, it was confined to material in the Starr Report and accompanying documents. This would lock down the case and prevent the House managers from sneaking in any additional allegations (such as the nasty, wholly peripheral Willey or Broaddrick charges) against Clinton. It would also ensure that the Senate proceedings did not turn into a “food fight,” as had occurred in the House. Second, the parties agreed that the issue of witnesses would be postponed for several weeks. If any senator wished to file a motion to dismiss the case before voting on the question of witnesses, he or she could do so. If the trial proceeded, the senators would vote on proposed witnesses as a group rather than individually, to prevent dragging out the process. Moreover, witnesses would have to be deposed first; only then would senators consider whether to permit live witnesses at trial. Implicitly, the two sides agreed that no procedural decisions would be made by the Republican leadership without the concurrence of the Democrats. “It was a resolution which effectively gave a veto power to Senator Daschle, the minority leader, about all the further proceedings in that trial,” said Parliamentarian Dove, summing up the remarkable nonagreement.
Although Senator Lott emphasized that the Gramm-Kennedy deal had very few teeth as a formal matter, he did admit that it allowed his Democratic colleagues to feel “that