Livingston Hopes for Early Impeachment Vote

House Speaker-elect Bob Livingston (R-La.) said Sunday that he hopes the House will vote on impeachment of the president before year’s end, even if it has to return to Washington for several hours of debate in a special session.

Sounding eager to make his mark as a legislative manager in the new year’s 106th Congress, rather than as the man who presided over impeachment, Livingston said his twin goals for next year are passage of “significant tax cuts” and protection of the Social Security system.

“I would like to send the president not just one tax cut, I’d like to send him several over the next couple of years,” Livingston said on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press.”

As for impeachment, Livingston said that if the Judiciary Committee’s final recommendation requires a vote by the full House, “I’d be prepared to ask Newt Gingrich, as the current speaker of the House, to call us in a special session this year. I wouldn’t imagine it will take a lot of debate--most of the issues have been on the table for the last year--and consider two or three hours of debate, vote on the issue up or down and be done with it.”

Livingston, currently the Appropriations Committee chairman, won election as speaker by appealing to his fellow Republicans as an effective manager who would not have the ideological fervor or potential divisiveness of Gingrich (R-Ga.) but could still craft an appealing message of accomplishment for the Republican party.

“We are for less government, more honest government, lower taxes, rolling back more power and authority to the American family and to the communities, and if I can do that, if I can do it cleanly and neatly, I think that America has great times ahead,” he said.

As part of the tax-cutting effort, “I’d like to have a sweeping across-the-board rate reduction for all taxpayers,” Livingston said. “The American people are overtaxed, and they deserve a tax cut--and I’m going to make it the top priority of the Republican Congress.”

President Clinton has been insisting all year that Congress should not use the budget surplus to cut taxes until it deals with the future solvency of the Social Security system. Livingston said Congress can do both.

The former prosecutor rejected proposals for congressional censure of the president as a “version of plea bargaining, which I think is outside the province of the House of Representatives.” If the House votes for articles of impeachment, “which means all they do is charge the president,” Livingston said, “then the plea bargain . . . seems to be more appropriately a question for the Senate.”

Many influential Democrats, hoping to head off a House vote on impeachment, are endorsing censure as an appropriate punishment for the president for allegedly lying under oath about his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky.

Impeachment is “far beyond what should be done,” said Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on the CBS-TV program “Face the Nation.” “I think a censure or rebuke makes sense.”

Schumer, who has won election to the Senate, added: “I don’t want my children or grandchildren reading in the history books that someone lied under oath, which I think the president did, and was not rebuked for it.”

One of the president’s most avid defenders on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said on CNN’s “Late Edition” that he would “vote for a motion of disapproval, a motion that expresses our unhappiness with the president’s behavior.”

This approach would be acceptable to the White House. “The president has said that we are in favor of any serious and reasonable proposition that has the promise of bringing this to a prompt and just conclusion,” said Gregory Craig, special counsel to the president, on “Meet the Press.”

However, Judiciary Committee Republicans want the full House to take an “up or down vote on impeachment,” said Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) on “Face the Nation.” Rep. Mary Bono (R-Palm Springs) agreed, saying, “this vote is going to be a vote of the heart and the conscience.”

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said a Republican president would not have survived the scandal surrounding Clinton. “If this had been a Republican president who had done this, you think he’d be sitting here today? I don’t,” Hatch said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I think he’d be gone. I think we’d have thrown him out.”