White House Told to Resist Legal Wrangling

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) warned the White House on Sunday that challenging the House’s recent vote to impeach President Clinton on procedural grounds could backfire.

The White House has suggested that the impeachment procedure might be invalid because a “lame-duck” House of Representatives whose members’ terms expire at year’s end passed along the articles of impeachment to a Senate that will be part of the new Congress on Jan. 6.

But Daschle suggested that any maneuver aimed at overturning the House vote would smack of the same sort of legalisms that Clinton has invoked to say he did not lie when he denied having sexual relations with Monica S. Lewinsky. It “would delay the process, politicize the environment--and I don’t think it would succeed,” he said.

Senate Deliberations Expected to Begin

Daschle, appearing on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press,” also rejected the idea raised recently that 34 Democratic senators could short-circuit a trial of Clinton in the Senate by signing a letter pledging a vote against conviction. Under the Constitution, a two-thirds vote of the Senate is necessary to convict an impeached president, so any 34 of the 100 senators can prevent conviction.

Like many of his Senate colleagues, Daschle said he believes there are not enough Senate votes to remove Clinton from office. But he also said he expects a Senate trial to begin early next month, even as senators privately discussed alternative ways to resolve the crisis, including the possibility of censure.

Two of his Republican colleagues, Sens. John Ashcroft of Missouri and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, agreed that a trial will get underway but rejected censure as an acceptable compromise.

“I think that the most profound and the strongest censure allowed in the Constitution has already been made--it’s been made by the House of Representatives in its impeachment action,” Ashcroft said, speaking on ABC-TV’s “This Week.”

“For it to impeach the president, the only elected president ever to be impeached in history, is the strongest censure that the Constitution allows,” Ashcroft added. “When the House impeaches, . . . the Senate has a responsibility under the Constitution to try the impeachment.”

Santorum agreed, saying: “We . . . have to look at the precedent we’re setting for history. This is not just about Bill Clinton. This is about the Senate performing its constitutional duty only for the second time in the history of this country, and we have an obligation to do what’s right for history.”

If there are censure discussions, Daschle said, they would be made “all the more difficult” if Republicans insisted that the president acknowledge that he lied under oath as part of any compromise--something Clinton thus far has refused to do.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), speaking on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation,” said Clinton would have no choice but to do so for censure to be an option.

“I think he has to admit it, because everybody in the world knows he did lie under oath,” Hatch said. “I think he’s got to get rid of this phony set of legal parsing and hairsplitting that really has gotten him in this trouble to begin with.”

Sen. John B. Breaux (D-La.), agreeing with Hatch that an admission by Clinton would be “appropriate,” pointed out that House Democrats concluded that Clinton gave false testimony.

Daschle predicted that Congress would be gridlocked during a Senate trial at a time when the nation would be pressing for action on education, managed care regulation and a solution to Social Security’s long-term financing problems. An impeachment trial “is too grave” for the Senate to be diverted by other issues, he said.

But Santorum disagreed, saying: “We don’t really get serious about passing legislation in Congress till mid- to late February. It’s usually a committee process. So we could have, really, a full-blown trial for a month or so and not really impede the actions of the Senate.”

‘Extraordinarily Difficult Process’

Daschle was asked his reaction to Clinton’s remarks in a recent story in The Times that quoted the president as saying during a holiday party at the White House that he felt “not bad” about his impeachment and predicted that historians would not give it undue weight when analyzing his presidency.

“I think this has been an extraordinarily difficult process for the president, for the first lady, for his family, for the country, for everybody,” Daschle said. “I don’t think anyone can tell you today what the impact will be.”

But conservative author William J. Bennett, also appearing on the NBC program, said: “Let’s get one thing clear. Bill Clinton has been impeached. . . . He is impeached, and he will be impeached forever. And in 50 years, when we read Bill Clinton’s name, we will not see his public opinion polls, but we will see next to it: ‘Impeached.’ ”