Loss on Ethics Amendment Is Still a Win for Boxer : Senate: She couldn’t force open Packwood hearings, but she cornered Republicans and won wide attention.

Barbara Boxer was working the Senate floor like a miniature version of LBJ. Moving in on a seated colleague, she leaned over him, hacking the air with hand gestures that moved her subject progressively backward in his chair.

Lesson delivered, she moved on to a gaggle of standing senators. Gazing sharply upward to make eye contact, she lectured and elicited courteous, noncommittal nods before scanning the floor for her next target.

Boxer was smiling, loose. Trolling for votes this week on her controversial amendment to force public hearings on the Sen. Bob Packwood sexual harassment scandal, the first-term Democrat from California was thoroughly enjoying her most prominent solo turn in the Senate spotlight.

It came to an end Wednesday on a near-party-line vote of 52 to 48 rejecting her proposal.

Boxer said afterward that her “interest hadn’t waned” in the issue, but aides said she had no definite plans for other legislative forays on the Packwood matter. The defeat on the floor was predictable, but Boxer sees a personal victory in having raised the issue.

It was, she agrees, a breakthrough. “We’ve gotten the most national attention on this issue. It has grabbed people’s imagination.

“What makes me feel good--I wouldn’t use the term fun --is I’m a leader on an issue that 60% of the American people support, and I’m really committed to telling the truth about it, and I’m really glad I’m here,” Boxer said earlier this week after the Republicans had foiled another attempt to introduce the amendment.

The cause that gives her such joy has produced head-shaking and angry muttering in the white-male-dominated institution she joined 2 1/2 years ago.

“She’s the most partisan senator that I’ve ever known in the Senate,” said Majority Leader Bob Dole--whose own instinct for the jugular is legend.

But the Packwood issue has provided Boxer with a politician’s dream scenario: a virtual win-win situation. By succeeding in her effort to bring the amendment to the floor, she forced the Republicans into an uncomfortable political corner--and commandeered two hours of spirited floor debate. Even though her maneuver was blocked, advocates of open government will howl even louder about the Republicans’ closed-door tactics.

Indeed, women’s groups are likely to fuel the issue for weeks to come. The National Women’s Political Caucus, meeting in Nashville, Tenn., will be voting on a resolution Saturday calling for open Packwood hearings. Perhaps more important, the issue gave Boxer an opportunity to recast herself as more than an outspoken feminist, playing the role of crusading institutional reformer as well--taunting her Republican foes all the while.

“The more they try to make me the issue, the weaker they look and the more credibility I get,” Boxer said.

After weeks of senatorial vitriol over Boxer’s demand for open hearings, the Senate Ethics Committee on Monday voted 3 to 3 along party lines not to hold public hearings on allegations of sexual and official misconduct by Packwood (R-Ore.). It takes a majority of four to order hearings.

In four other major ethics case since 1977, the Senate has conducted open hearings on cases in which they have “substantial credible evidence” of misconduct--as they have in the Packwood case.

Former Sen. Harrison Williams of New Jersey was expelled from the Senate for misdeeds in the Abscam bribery scandal the early 1980s. Former California Sen. Alan Cranston was reprimanded by the committee in 1991 for his involvement in the Keating Five scandal.

Boxer’s amendment would have forced public hearings in future cases when they reach the investigative stage unless a majority of four members voted to close them.

Republicans--particularly Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Ethics Committee chairman, lambasted Boxer for meddling in committee business and usurping its prerogatives.

In the tradition-bound Senate, few Democrats were inclined to become enmeshed in the unseemly Packwood case. But Boxer chose to exploit it.

Long a champion of women’s issues, she was one of seven House women who marched on the Senate in October, 1991, to urge a delay in the vote on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court until sexual harassment charges against him made by Anita Hill could be examined.

She calculated that the Packwood situation offered a threefold opportunity. She could mine one of her core issues; she could attack on procedural, not personal, grounds (Packwood is not mentioned by name in her amendment), and she could make Republicans squirm.

Boxer has the reputation as a go-it-alone promoter of liberal causes, rather than a go-along, get-along member respectful of the Senate’s stately pomp and pace.

With the Packwood amendment, Boxer seized an issue she reckoned will play far differently in the hinterlands than in the upper chamber, where procedural nuance takes on Gargantuan importance.

Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.) acknowledged as much during debate on her amendment Wednesday, saying that the Ethics Committee’s decision to not hold hearings looked bad “while the senator from California was railing about it.”

Boxer appeared to take the high road by charging that the Republicans are circling the wagons around Finance Committee Chairman Packwood, besieged for 2 1/2 years by the sexual harassment charges.

“Here you have people--Republicans--who want to clear the air on Whitewater . . . want to clear the air on Waco. But they don’t want to clear the air on Bob Packwood, they want to shut the doors,” Boxer said. “ . . . In my view that’s hypocritical, at the least. At the most, maybe they’re just protecting one of their own.”

By issuing those stinging words, Boxer earned points for courage and perseverance--among Democrats--and may more sharply define her as a national figure.

Boxer knows she will pay.

“It helps her with Democrats, but Republicans in the Senate will probably go the extra mile to frustrate her other legislative goals,” said Larry Sabato, a Congress-watcher and professor of government at the University of Virginia. “She latched onto a popular issue that has pretty broad appeal, especially among women.

“It’s difficult for a [first-term senator] to make such a mark--or make any mark at all. But the downside is that it brands her as being fairly partisan.”

These are not exactly fighting words.

“Even though some would say I’m doing this for partisan purposes, in their heart of hearts they know I’m right about this,” Boxer said. “I don’t think this is so out of character for someone who four years walked over from the House and said, ‘Please, have public hearings on Anita Hill.’ This isn’t that unusual for me.”