In Party-Line Vote, Senate OKs Limited Hearings on Whitewater

The Senate, trying to cut a partisan knot, voted along party lines Tuesday to begin limited hearings into the Whitewater controversy before the end of next month.

With all 56 Democrats voting yes and 43 Republicans voting no, the Senate approved a resolution offered by Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) to authorize the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee to investigate some aspects of Whitewater at hearings to begin no later than July 29.

Republicans, however, want the hearings to have a wider focus than the Democrats do and they launched a parliamentary tactic designed to get their way.

The sessions authorized by the resolution would focus on the initial phase of the Whitewater investigation being conducted by special counsel Robert B. Fiske Jr. and would be confined to the three areas he has finished investigating.

These include the suicide of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, the White House handling of Foster’s Whitewater-related papers after his death and allegedly improper contacts between White House aides and Treasury Department officials examining President Clinton’s ties to Whitewater Development Corp. when he was governor of Arkansas in the 1980s.

Hearings on other aspects of the controversy, including allegations that Whitewater had been used to siphon money from an Arkansas thrift that later went bankrupt, would occur only after Fiske has finished investigating them.

Dismissing Republican demands for wider hearings before Fiske has completed his criminal inquiry, Mitchell said his proposal is the only way to avoid “a political circus” and exercise the Senate’s “oversight responsibilities in a serious way.”

Angry Republicans, however, refused to see it that way. Protesting that Mitchell’s resolution was a “sham” designed to “whitewash Whitewater,” GOP senators immediately threatened to stall the Senate in an ongoing Whitewater debate by offering amendment after amendment to expand both the scope and the venue for the hearings. Under Mitchell’s proposal, Democrats would be in control since they outnumber Republicans on the Banking Committee, 12 to 8.

Indeed, no sooner had the Democrats adopted Mitchell’s proposal in hopes of ending three days of partisan gridlock on the issue than the Senate was plunged once again into a legislative stalemate.

Each time the Republicans offered a Whitewater amendment on unrelated legislation, the Democrats countered with modifying legislation of their own to kill it.

Leading the GOP charge, Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, served notice that he had 47 Whitewater-related amendments and would propose each of them as the Senate considered legislation authorizing nearly $6 billion in improvements to airports across the nation.

Mitchell made it equally clear that he would offer a modifying, or “second degree,” amendment to counter D’Amato’s proposals.

“Our list (of amendments) will be as long as Alfonse wants it to be, or at least until members get tired of this,” a Mitchell aide said, adding that the majority leader was prepared to keep the Senate in session late into the night for the rest of the week as the two sides work their way through the long list of tit-for-tat amendments.

“This is getting quite repetitious,” Mitchell conceded at one point as he accused the Republicans of “zigging and zagging and flipping and flopping” and throwing the Senate into legislative contortions to “simply attack the President and Mrs. Clinton . . . for raw partisan political reasons.”

D’Amato angrily countered that Mitchell’s hearings plan amounts to no more than “a phony and transparent effort to engage in sham oversight” by limiting the scope of the hearings. “Would (my) Democratic colleagues accept hearings so limited in scope if there was a Republican in the White House?” he asked.

Republicans “don’t want an investigation . . . to uncover and punish wrongdoing if it is found. . . . All they want is a political circus,” Mitchell said.