Parties Flex Muscles in Bid to Shape Opinion

When Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) late Friday objected to House Republicans describing senators as jurors, he was expressing more than a point of personal pique.

Harkin cut to the heart of the battle underway to shape the perceptions of the Senate impeachment proceedings--a battle that could determine both the public’s tolerance for the ongoing case and whether the GOP can build any meaningful pressure on Democratic senators to turn against the president.

That battle can be summarized as a struggle to define the Senate proceedings as a trial or a fundamentally political decision.

In the opening presentations concluded Saturday, the case’s Republican House managers have worked to liken the case to a criminal trial--in which senators are effectively compelled to vote for conviction and removal if they believe the House has proved its factual case against Clinton.

Harkin crystallized a widespread Democratic belief that the Senate is required to consider a much broader range of considerations when deciding whether Clinton’s offenses would justify his removal. In effect, Harkin established a political hurdle for the House prosecutors, beyond the familiar court-like questions of whether Clinton is guilty of the offenses charged and whether those offenses constitute high crimes and misdemeanors.

As Harkin put it: “We are charged not just with facts and law but also what’s in the public good and what’s the general welfare of the people of this country in deciding on impeachment cases.”

As the House Republicans completed their opening arguments--and the focus shifts toward the White House defense this week-- the first days’ events provided evidence for both sides’ interpretations of the Senate proceedings. Indeed, the Senate process appeared to be diverging in form and substance.

In form, the tightly controlled format, which kept the 100 senators listening in virtual silence to lengthy presentations from the House managers, gave the deliberations much more of a sedate, trial-like air than the raucous and angry debates in the House.

At the same time, though, Democratic and Republican senators were steaming toward overtly partisan confrontations about the calling of witnesses and the possible dismissal of the case--showdowns that could presage a virtual party-line vote on the ultimate question of whether to convict and remove the president.

“It looks bipartisan now,” says Paul Rothstein, a law professor at Georgetown University. “But it’s going to degenerate.”

For Republicans looking to remove the president, these two trends work at fundamentally cross purposes. The trial-like atmosphere has given the House GOP its best chance to lay out Clinton’s behavior in an uninterrupted fashion that could tilt public opinion somewhat against the president and undo some of the damage done to their party’s image during the fierce House proceedings.

“The more this story is told . . . the more damaging it will be for the president because it’s clear that he did some bad stuff, maybe not impeachable, but still bad,” says Rothstein.

Partisan Conflict Could Spell Trouble

But the return of partisan conflict in the Senate could obscure the effect of those presentations by reinforcing the public belief that the case is more about political animosities than transcendent standards of law and morality. From the outset, that perspective has helped sustain public opposition to Clinton’s removal from office, even as a growing percentage of Americans have said in polls that they believe he is guilty of the offenses Republicans alleged over the last three days.

“The perception of guilt has grown [even before last week’s presentations],” says Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a nonpartisan polling group. “But with it has not grown the sense that he should be removed. In large part, that was because this has been seen as an unfair set of accusations and a partisan, if not ideologically based, inquiry.”

For all of the partisan clouds looming over it, the Senate process is functioning enough like a trial to sharpen many of the factual disputes at the heart of the underlying case--disputes that were overshadowed by the political pyrotechnics in the House.

In their presentations last week, the House managers, particularly Reps. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) and James E. Rogan (R-Glendale), were able to challenge some of Clinton’s key defenses. For instance, Hutchinson powerfully confronted Clinton’s claim that he isn’t guilty of witness tampering because he didn’t anticipate that his secretary Betty Currie could be called as a witness when he directed her through a set of leading questions after his deposition in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment lawsuit a year ago today.

Clinton Deposition Discussed at Trial

Hutchinson noted that during Clinton’s deposition, the president had cited Currie as a potential “corroborating witness” for his testimony at least six times, clearly suggesting that he envisioned her as “a prospective witness” in the case.

But the House managers also interpreted the record in aggressive ways that could leave them vulnerable to counterattack when the White House attorneys make their case this week. On several key points, the House managers insisted that the inference, or the circumstantial weight, of the evidence points against Clinton, even though the direct sworn testimony is much more ambiguous or even supportive of his position.

For instance, several of the House managers argued that Clinton was behind Monica S. Lewinsky’s decision to turn over to Currie gifts from the president that Jones’ lawyers had subpoenaed. But, as the White House is sure to emphasize, Currie testified to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s grand jury that it was Lewinsky who initiated the transfer of the gifts. And neither Lewinsky nor Currie testified that Clinton ever instructed them to conceal the gifts.

Even on the witness-tampering issue, Hutchinson never directly rebutted Currie’s grand jury testimony that she felt no pressure--”none whatsoever”--to agree with Clinton’s statements when he took her through those questions.

Contesting such factual disputes will be one track of the battle between the House Republicans and the White House in the days ahead. But they will also be competing on the second track: the fight to shape public opinion and build political support for their position in the case. At times it may be difficult to keep those two tracks from colliding, as the battle over calling witnesses will demonstrate later this month.

Implicit in the House’s opening presentations has been the belief that they have little chance of attracting the 12 Democratic votes they need to remove Clinton if they cannot shake up the political equation by presenting witnesses, a point Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) emphasized after Saturday’s session ended.

Much as on each key decision in the House, Senate Republicans who had earlier expressed skepticism about witnesses now appear inclined to fall in line with their party’s dominant view. And even some Senate Democrats may feel compelled to support summoning witnesses, if only to avoid the perception that they are trying to sweep the case under the rug.

But the calling of witnesses may be another instance in which a largely party-line procedural victory for the GOP actually retards its larger goal of removing Clinton.

Some Republicans hope that witnesses can be the crystallizing event that finally converts public disgust with Clinton’s behavior into support for his removal. “To bring in witnesses will personalize the trial and bring a human face to the facts and to the accusations,” predicts GOP pollster Frank Luntz. “It could galvanize the public, who has already come to the conclusion that Clinton is guilty, to support a stronger response from the U.S. Senate than acquittal.”

Yet the overall effect of a pitched battle between the parties over witnesses is likely to harden partisan divisions, not only in the Senate but the country as well. That, in turn, makes it less likely that the Senate proceedings will shift public opinion to any significant extent or that any measurable number of Democrats would defect on the ultimate vote of convicting the president.

“For every action there tends to be an opposite reaction,” says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “If the Republicans harden the partisan lines, and harden the partisan argument, I think Democrats are going to be more likely to stay together.”

Given the damage that a clash over calling witnesses now is likely to inflict on Republican hopes of attracting Democratic votes later, Rothstein believes the real GOP goal in demanding live testimony may be more political than legal. “Even if they can’t win the vote [to convict Clinton] in the end, they can certainly damage the president and the Democratic Party on the way, and they intend to inflict as much damage as they can.”

Luntz doesn’t see such punitive motives in the push for witnesses. But he agrees that witnesses could offer political advantages even if they don’t increase the odds of conviction.

“If the Senate through witnesses makes it so clear that this president committed perjury, then the public may look at the Democrats as trying to cover it up,” he says. “The damage that was done to Republicans in the House will be minimized if not abrogated in its entirety.”

Yet, for the GOP, the push for witnesses continues to raise the bet they have already made on impeachment. All these other considerations may be overwhelmed if witnesses drag on the case for several more weeks, deepening public disgust with the spectacle. And, if after extending the process, the House presentation can produce nothing more than an essentially party-line vote on removing Clinton, the public impression of the entire confrontation as a political rather than legal crisis could well be cemented--with ominous implications for the Republicans who have extended it.

“If it ends up as a straight party-line vote, wow,” says Kohut. “It’s the Republicans against the Democrats, and the Republicans who have wasted the country’s time.”