Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [433]
Senator Trent Lott was a master at counting votes. He understood the ramifications of Byrd’s statement. He had known all along that “in order to have any chance at all of getting [sixty-seven] votes, we had to get people like Lieberman and Byrd.” The case was slipping from the Republicans’ grasp.
Henry Hyde and his managers, meanwhile, were beginning to feel like the “proverbial skunk at the garden party.” Angry that their senatorial brethren were not doing enough to rescue their case, they decided to call Monica Lewinsky as a live witness.
At an emergency hearing in Judge Norma Holloway Johnson’s chambers, just as Senator Byrd’s motion was shot down along party lines, Ken Starr’s office made an appearance to support the House managers. Deputy Bob Bittman told Judge Johnson that Lewinsky’s immunity agreement required her to cooperate with government officials in all proceedings, including “congressional hearings.”
Robert Dove would later recall: “The whole issue of Monica Lewinsky could be summed up in the phrase ‘tacky.’ Just something that should never happen on the Senate floor.” Increasingly, senators—including Republicans—were becoming irked that Starr was still sticking his nose into their business. This did not help the senators’ cause. Their cause was getting elected every six years, passing legislation, worrying about tax cuts and social security. It was not about seeking public retribution “for the sins of the president.” With the reappearance of Starr on the scene, “it was like Cotton Mather was somehow abroad in the land. And his time had passed.”
The House managers, as well, seemed to be going off the deep end. They had gone so far as to float the idea of hauling Bill Clinton himself into the Senate and forcing him to testify. Even Majority Leader Trent Lott whispered to fellow Republicans that this latest proposal bordered on madness: “We are not the British Parliament or the Canadian Parliament,” he said. The idea of summoning the president of the United States into the well of the Senate and giving him a “tongue-lashing” seemed to be flatly inconsistent with the American system of government premised upon separation of powers.
Henry Hyde, for his part, regretted that his team did not declare all-out war on his Senate brethren. “I should have stood up, gotten the attention of the chief justice [Rehnquist], and moved that he request the president to appear and answer questions,” Hyde later said.
Hyde also kicked himself for not raising holy hell and demanding that Monica Lewinsky appear in the flesh. Who was Senator Byrd to play “Stonewall Jackson,” acting like a sanctimonious statesman who had never seen a lady’s petticoat? What Hyde believed was a clear-cut case of perjury and obstruction of justice was being spun by the White House to make it appear as if it were a benign case of “lying about sex.” He was also frosted that the senators were treating him and his fellow managers like “the [drunken] uncle who shows up at an anniversary party,” keeping them at a distance as if they might act inappropriately. Hyde felt like subpoenaing the infamous blue dress and waving it around the Senate floor so that these holier-than-thou senators would be forced to confront Clinton’s outright lies and gross misdeeds. Hyde’s chief counsel, David Schippers, noted, “That would have killed Byrd. He would have died right on the floor.”
On February 1, Monica Lewinsky faced a swarm of photographers outside the Mayflower Hotel as she arrived for her formal deposition by the House managers. It was a scene reminiscent of the early days of Monicagate. In the spirit of the initial Gramm-Kennedy deal, the Senate Democratic and Republican