D’Amato’s Senate Floor Attack on Clinton Draws Swift Rebuke

The Whitewater controversy overflowed onto the Senate floor Thursday when Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), one of President Clinton’s most acerbic critics on the subject, accused the President of hypocrisy for seeking to raise taxes for most Americans while dodging his own.

The caustic attack drew immediate rebuke from Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), who accused D’Amato of debasing the tradition of Senate debates by making knowingly false and distorted allegations to score political points.

In his remarks, D’Amato said: “The President has sought to tax everything that moves and some things that don’t. . . . Now that the President has raised everyone else’s taxes, we discover that he had not paid all of his own.

“It seems like the President never met a tax he didn’t like--except his own,” he said.

Although such combative sarcasm is not unusual for D’Amato, it was a measure of the partisan tension that Whitewater has aroused in the Senate that Mitchell strode quickly to the floor to issue what was for him an unusually stinging rebuke.

Taking issue with the assertion that Clinton had raised “everyone else’s taxes,” Mitchell said that D’Amato “surely knew his statements to be obviously false and untrue” but made them to “cause political damage and embarrassment” to the President.

“Whitewater, Whitewater, Whitewater. That is the Republican program in the spring of 1994,” Mitchell said, accusing the Republicans of seeking to use the Clintons’ involvement in a real estate venture in the Ozarks to sabotage health care reform and other items on the Administration’s agenda.

Behind the partisan tension lay a dispute over when and how the Senate will honor Republican demands for hearings into the tangled Whitewater events.

Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) is pressing Mitchell to agree to appoint a special committee to begin Whitewater hearings as early as next month. But Mitchell, while promising hearings, has said they can occur only when Robert B. Fiske Jr., the special counsel named to investigate Whitewater, indicates that a public inquiry will not endanger his criminal investigation.