GOP Ends Whitewater Filibuster, Gets Vote on Inquiry

Senate Republicans ended a filibuster over the breadth of Whitewater hearings late Thursday after Democrats agreed to allow a vote next week on a GOP plan to expand the inquiry.

The Republican plan, to be voted on next Tuesday, calls for an inquiry into any Whitewater developments after President Clinton was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 1993. The GOP wants hearings to begin by July 22, a week earlier than the Democrats’ deadline.

The Republicans virtually halted Senate action for the last week as they introduced one proposal after another--all designed to expand the limited hearings already approved in a Democratic resolution.

Each time they did so, Democrats responded with a superseding resolution that negated the Republican effort.

Under the latest deal, negotiated by Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), Republicans will get a vote on their proposal next Tuesday. Democrats will not introduce a superseding amendment, although the GOP effort is likely to fail on a party-line vote.

Republicans then would have to decide whether to start tying up legislation again. The end of the filibuster had an immediate effect, as the Senate late Thursday was able to pass bills to run congressional operations and authorize construction projects at the nation’s airports.

The Senate last Tuesday, voting straight party line, approved Mitchell’s language for narrowly focused Senate Whitewater hearings to begin by July 29.

The hearings would concentrate on contacts between Administration officials and savings and loan regulators; the suicide of White House lawyer Vincent Foster, who was handling Whitewater legal work for the President, and the removal of files from Foster’s office.

Originally, the language was added to the airport construction bill. But under the new agreement, it was removed from that legislation and made a separate resolution that will be voted on Tuesday.

The language of the proposal by Dole and Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) calls for an investigation of any activity in connection with Whitewater that occurred after Clinton became President. Any action that may have been “illegal, improper, unauthorized or unethical” could receive scrutiny.

Republicans had demanded hearings that would include Clinton’s former Arkansas real estate development and its relationship to the failed Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, owned by Clinton’s Whitewater business partner.

The latest Republican compromise still would prevent hearings on Whitewater that occurred when Clinton was governor of Arkansas. That period will remain under investigation for some time by special counsel Robert B. Fiske Jr., who has asked Congress not to interfere with his criminal probe.

One matter that could be probed under the Republican--but not the Democratic--language would be internal strife in the Resolution Trust Corp., the agency dealing with the assets of failed savings and loan associations.

An RTC investigator, Jean Lewis, was removed from the Whitewater case late last year. She said her superiors asked whether she would change her conclusion that the Whitewater land development caused a loss to Madison depositors.