GOP Seeks to Thwart Bid for Open Packwood Hearings : Senate: They threaten to probe Chappaquiddick incident if Democrats do not drop demands to publicly address charges against their colleague.

Senate Republicans, seeking to protect a senior colleague, have threatened to hold hearings into Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s involvement in the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident if Democrats do not drop demands for public hearings into charges of sexual misconduct against Finance Committee Chairman Bob Packwood (R-Ore.).

The threats have been directed particularly toward Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who, along with other female senators, is trying to force the Ethics Committee to hold public hearings on the Packwood allegations by threatening to make the full Senate vote on the issue.

Until now, the debate over how to handle the Packwood affair had been held behind tightly closed doors--at the confidential deliberations of the Senate Ethics Committee and in Republican policy meetings where GOP lawmakers this week discussed possible strategies for thwarting Boxer’s attempt to force a floor vote.

But as public pressure for open hearings grows, the dispute is threatening to break into the open, swamping the Senate in partisan rancor and splitting it along gender lines.

Lawmakers have been divided over how to handle the scandal ever since the Ethics Committee issued the legislative equivalent of an indictment against Packwood two months ago, finding that there was “substantial credible evidence” to support allegations of sexual and official misconduct.

Republicans and Democrats on the ethics panel have been deadlocked over whether to hold public hearings on the charges or to break with the precedent set in other high-profile ethics cases and judge Packwood in private. To the discomfort of their male colleagues, six of the Senate’s eight female members--the five Democratic women plus Republican Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine--are demanding open hearings. The Senate’s Republican leadership is strongly resisting that idea.

“I just don’t see how we can justify not holding public hearings,” said Snowe, who admits to being in a “very small minority” among Republicans on the issue. She noted that the Senate held open hearings into Anita Faye Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas before confirmation of his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1989.

In response, former GOP Whip Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) said that “the Anita Hill hearings should never have been held in public in the first place.”

But while GOP leaders are irritated by Snowe’s stance, it is Boxer’s threat to force a Senate vote on hearings if the Ethics Committee refuses to act that has drawn their fiercest ire.

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Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) criticized Boxer earlier this week for “grandstanding” in the Packwood affair and exploiting it for partisan ends. And although Simpson denies that he was making threats, he pulled Boxer aside on Tuesday and gave her “a stern warning” that her persistence in seeking public hearings might provoke the Republicans to hold hearings on “every Democratic scandal going back to 1969,” a Boxer aide said.

The date has a double meaning. The first allegations of sexual misconduct against Packwood go back to 1969. It is also the year in which a car driven by Kennedy careened off the Chappaquiddick bridge in Massachusetts, resulting in the drowning death of the senator’s female companion, Mary Jo Kopechne.

Simpson insisted that there was “not a single shred of threat or warning” in what he told Boxer. He merely pointed out, he said, that “a lot of people are saying that if they’re going to go back to 1969, then let’s go back and find everything that happened since then and never got to the stage of a public hearing. I leave it to your imagination to guess where that baby goes.”

The threat to revisit Chappaquiddick was first conveyed to Boxer by Ethics Committee Chairman Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who also warned her that Republicans would retaliate by launching a probe into allegations that Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) once improperly intervened with federal regulators on behalf of a friend’s air charter company.

Boxer has refused to comment on either conversation, but says that the threats will not deter her from trying to force a floor vote on hearings next week if the ethics panel did not act by today to authorize public hearings. McConnell also refused to comment, but he abruptly canceled an Ethics Committee meeting that was to have taken place last week and, as of Thursday, had not scheduled another one.

Boxer insists that Daschle and other Democrats she has consulted have all supported her effort to make the Senate go on record as favoring or opposing public hearings into the allegations against Packwood.

The charges include that he made unwanted sexual advances toward at least 17 women between 1969 and 1990, and subsequently sought to destroy evidence by altering his private diaries before they were subpoenaed by the Ethics Committee.

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But, apart from the support of public interest groups and 25 female Democrats in the House, Boxer has been left conspicuously alone in her growing public confrontation with Senate Republicans.

For Dole, there is also an added dilemma. With or without public hearings, the Senate will still be faced with punishing Packwood if the Ethics Committee finds him guilty of the charges. But public hearings, along with the outrage they would almost certainly provoke among women’s groups as the details of the allegations spill out, could add to pressures for punishment tougher than mere censure.

At the least, ethics experts say, Republicans may feel they have no choice but to strip Packwood of his chairmanship of the Finance Committee.