Impeachment Ball Lands in Courtly Senate

From Barbara Boxer on the left to Kay Bailey Hutchison on the right, the Senate’s nine women get together for dinner now and then. On such occasions, they check their ideologies and party labels at the door, talking instead about families, personal lives and the shared rigors of serving as United States senators.

Now two male senators, one Democrat and one Republican, have begun organizing informal get-togethers for all 100 senators and their families--relaxed, secluded events where the participants can get to know each other as individuals, not just by their party labels and voting records.

With the focus of President Clinton’s impeachment shifting from one side of the Capitol to the other, the Senate’s collegial folkways and cooperative spirit may exercise a profound impact on the outcome.

They contrast with the 435-member House, a largely impersonal institution given to vitriolic rhetoric and partisan attack. That tradition was on display when the House voted along party lines on Dec. 19 to approve two articles of impeachment charging President Clinton with lying to a grand jury and obstructing justice in the Monica S. Lewinsky affair.

When a new Congress convenes on Jan. 6, it will be the Senate’s turn. Acting as a jury of 100 in Clinton’s trial, it will have the constitutional power to convict Clinton and expel him from office.

The ethos of the Senate may make it easier to devise a solution somewhere between exoneration and expulsion--a resolution of censure, for example, that would sharply rebuke the president but allow him to finish out his final two years in office.

“The Senate is going to set a very high standard for civility and bipartisanship,” Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) promised Sunday. “You will see . . . Democrats and Republicans reaching out to find some sort of solution. I think you will see a totally different environment.”

To be sure, the Senate is no mutual admiration society. The nine female senators organized their dinners when they found that too many of their colleagues were comporting themselves like the House members that many of them once were. Ideological attacks and personal insults seemed to be growing more common; senatorial courtesy was fading.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) credits the dinners with bridging the partisan gulf. “We’ve found a great deal in common and become good friends,” she said. “We are very supportive of one another.”

Impeachment will be the acid test. It will take all the goodwill that the nine female senators and their 91 male colleagues can muster to forge a bipartisan solution to such a divisively partisan issue.

Convicting Clinton would require two-thirds of the Senate, or 67 members. Even if all 55 Republicans stick together, which is unlikely, 12 Democrats would have to defect, which is far more unlikely.

But it wouldn’t take more than a handful of hard-line conservatives in the Senate’s anti-Clinton caucus to derail the movement to censure Clinton. A conservative Senate faction forced Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) to back away in March from a proposal to censure the president but not impeach him.

Watching Lott’s every move is Majority Whip Don Nickles (R-Okla.), who is second to Lott in the Senate Republican leadership.

Nickles leads a band of ideologues who are not predisposed to cut even a popular president any slack. Among them are Republican Sens. John Ashcroft of Missouri, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Rod Grams of Minnesota, Jon Kyl of Arizona, James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Bob Smith of New Hampshire and Gordon Smith of Oregon.

“I don’t relish this task, but I expect that we will have a trial,” Nickles said in an interview. “The demeanor will be serious and solemn. It will be done in a very respectful and impartial way.”

Another influential bloc consists of the four moderate Republicans from New England, who are being targeted by censure-minded Senate Democrats: John H. Chafee of Rhode Island, James M. Jeffords of Vermont and Collins and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine.

If joined by just two other Republicans, they could provide the simple majority needed to abort a Senate trial and approve a censure resolution. They could, that is, if the 45 Democrats stick together.

Until a few days ago, it was not so clear that they would. But Democratic solidarity is all but ensured now that Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia have given their blessing to censure.

So the question becomes whether, and how hard, GOP hard- liners will resist. Many of them have close ties to the Christian right, which exerted strong pressure on House Republican moderates to impeach Clinton and has again mobilized a grass-roots campaign to oppose any effort to short-circuit a Senate trial.

Several conservative Republicans, including Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and Phil Gramm of Texas, have signaled an openness to alternatives to a full-blown trial.

“The instincts are there to work things out,” said Sheila Burke, longtime chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas. “That’s the nature of the Senate.”

Such cooperation is a byproduct of rules that allow minorities--often minorities of one--to block Senate action. “Individual senators have to accommodate others and maintain a certain level of civility,” said Thomas E. Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Because if that doesn’t happen, it can bring the institution to a screeching halt.”

Burke, now executive dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, added that the Senate gets a great deal of its business done only by unanimously agreeing to waive the rigid rules that would otherwise hamstring it. Any senator, she said, can indefinitely stall Senate consideration of an executive branch appointee or prevent a committee from meeting.

But such tactics can backfire.

“The Senate is a place where it’s very hard to get something done if you have created animus with a number of other senators,” said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.). He and Sen. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) have put together several potluck dinners for senators and their families that are “nothing more than what happens in a lot of neighborhoods.”

Such gatherings reflect a growing desire among senators to recapture the personal connections that have diminished over the years as members devote more time to fund-raising and campaigning and less to networking with one another.

“There’s just a sense among many of us that we need to get to know one another as humans,” said Sen. Dirk Kempthorne (R-Ida.), who has returned to Idaho and is about to become its governor. He has found that friendships that blossom during social gatherings “spill over into debate, especially on those long evenings when everybody’s tired and frayed around the edges.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said such relationships “give me the ability to sit down and talk frankly to someone without worrying that that individual is going to go out and tell someone what was just said. It builds trust.”

As a result, said Collins, “I expect the debate in the Senate [trial] to be far less partisan than the debate in the House. I expect we’ll see a high-toned debate that will make the American people proud.”

That’s an ambitious standard, and for now it seems difficult to achieve. Kempthorne recounted times when he has passed another senator in a hallway and said hello, only to have the colleague look away without answering.

“The comity around the building has deteriorated,” added Tom Korologos, a veteran Republican lobbyist who worked in Richard Nixon’s White House. It’s become more partisan. . . . They are meaner.

“Nobody trusts anybody anymore. They can’t even agree on the day of the week it is. The town has lost its trust.”