Trying Times Have Staid Senate All in a Dither

The alarm went off at 5 a.m. Tuesday in Dianne Feinstein’s San Francisco house, and it was all the senator could do to get out of bed and fly back to Washington.

The 106th Congress would convene the next day, Opening Day, a day of festivity and mirth when senators typically gather just long enough for the swearings-in, then head off for the obligatory round of celebrations.

But this year they would return to a spit-and-polished Capitol to find the political equivalent of a dead cat--the little matter of impeachment--on the doorstep. It had been sitting there through the holidays, and by Wednesday it was starting to stink up the place.

“I had to use all my mental faculties to pull myself out of bed because I didn’t want to come back,” Feinstein, a Democrat, said from her office Wednesday while sorting through a list of party invitations, most of which she would decline. “Today it was very somber, the enormity of it really hit me full scale. . . . I don’t feel like celebrating.”

The day’s official business--the administration of the oath of office to new and returning lawmakers-- was a mere footnote to the more somber duties that lay ahead. Children in suits and party dresses still dotted the House floor, and the Senate gallery was packed with beaming family members. But the 100 senators filed in preoccupied, struggling to figure out a way to conduct a trial that the vast majority of Americans have said they oppose, and still come out with clean hands.

“It’s a rare person who can walk through a big cow pasture and not have to clean his shoes,” said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. “And this is just a big old cow pasture.”

For all the moment of the imminent occasion--only the second presidential impeachment trial in the nation’s history--the overwhelming mood was one of confusion and doubt. Reporters packed the halls as senators huddled by party to plot a strategy. Every lawmaker who set foot in a public space was promptly mobbed by a cluster of reporters in mini-mushroom-cloud explosions that erupted all morning long.

In the middle of one of them was Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), all dressed up in a black pantsuit to be sworn in for her second term after a tight election battle. She came with a long legislative agenda that she can forget about for a while.

A reporter asked whether Boxer should recuse herself as a juror in the trial, given that her daughter is married to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s brother.

“I would never walk away from my duty,” Boxer declared. “If this were a regular jury trial, every one of us would be kicked off because we all have a familiarity with the president.”

But this is nothing like a regular jury trial. Here the tryers of fact are pondering not just the validity of the case at hand, but the political boomerang that threatens to circle back and whack them in the future.

If they don’t get this done quickly, they will be skewered by some as do-nothings who paralyzed the national agenda over a president’s sex life. If they don’t get this done thoroughly, others are never going to let them forget it.

Many senators seemed to come to the task holding their nose. There was much ado about decorum, the raucous House spectacle that gave birth to two articles of impeachment being the paradigm of how not to proceed.

The Senate always has considered itself the more pensive, deliberative chamber, the levelheaded parents to the adolescent House. Indeed, on Wednesday, Mom and Dad stepped into the picture and made clear that some rules were about to be set--if only they could figure out which ones.

“There is a yearning for dignity in this process,” Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) announced from the middle of one mushroom cloud.

“This very easily could degenerate into the kind of spectacle we saw in the House,” sniffed Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), who sustained his cloud for an admirable 30 minutes.

One trial strategy was to conduct the case without calling any witnesses (no presidential girlfriends, thus no seamy testimony). But that proposal seemed to be fading.

Feinstein was certain the proceedings would be more dignified simply because the senators will be required to communicate during the trial via little notes delivered to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who will preside over the trial.

“Oh, yes, absolutely--if only because no one can speak!” she noted.

Still, it seemed every aspect of this case was causing some sort of headache. The Senate is nothing if not a body of control freaks--it took them seven years to warm up to the idea of televised sessions, even after the House went on C-SPAN live and in color. So even the logistics were a challenge: Two long counsel tables might have to be squeezed into a chamber designed in the 19th century for a little more than half the number of senators who occupy it now.

Tickets are being printed up to portion out 596 seats for spectators, not counting the press. Most go to the senators to distribute as they wish. A paltry 50 go to the public, who will have to stand in line to claim one. New tickets will be issued daily. Once inside, no beepers or pagers. No newspapers. No talking. If you leave to go to the bathroom, you might lose your place.

The impending trial thus is shaping up as a study in chaos and decorum operating on parallel tracks.

Even Vice President Al Gore, who sauntered through the halls toward the Senate chamber to do the swearing in, attempted to rise breezily above the puzzling magnitude of it all.

“Are you here to lobby the jurors?” a reporter hollered out as Gore swept by in an eddy of Secret Service agents.

“Happy New Year!” the vice president responded.