Right Has Left Its Fervor Outside Senate

By some expectations, Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho) ought to be leading a vocal charge in the Senate to remove President Clinton from office.

A strait-laced Republican partisan with impeccable conservative credentials, Craig has made no secret of his distaste for Clinton’s behavior. As far back as September, he declared that the president “clearly has lied to the American people and has lied to a judge.”

Yet this week, as the Senate began formally trying Clinton on the impeachment charges brought by the House, Craig took his seat having tempered his ardor, adopting the measured, almost nonpartisan approach to the impeachment question that the Senate as a whole appears to have embraced.

Nor is he alone. So have many other of the Senate’s most conservative Republicans, among them Oklahoma’s Don Nickles and James M. Inhofe, Arizona’s Jon Kyl, New Hampshire’s Judd Gregg, Missouri’s John Ashcroft and Craig’s fellow Idahoan, Dirk Kempthorne.

“The bottom line is we have taken an oath of impartiality as jurors ordinarily do, and we do have to do impartial justice in this case, whatever one wants to call us,” Kyl said in an interview Friday during a break in the impeachment trial.

The senators’ posture stands in sharp contrast to that of their ideological counterparts in the House, who beat the impeachment issue into a frenzy this winter and--led by House GOP Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas)--aggressively pushed even moderate Republicans into supporting the House Judiciary Committee’s charges.

The Senate’s deliberations so far have been devoid of such activity. The senators also have been less prone than their House counterparts to toe the party line on key issues. There is no unanimity among Senate Republicans, for example, on how long the trial should last.

Different House, Senate Cultures

Larry Sabato, a Congress watcher at the University of Virginia, said that the disparity reflects the vastly different cultures--built into the structure of Congress by the Founding Fathers--between the politically sensitive, 435-member House and the smaller, more aloof and more independent-minded Senate.

“The Senate is a very different animal,” and trying to “herd senators in a single direction like a bunch of lemmings” most likely would backfire on whoever tried to perform DeLay’s role, Sabato said. “It’s hard for any one person or group to accumulate power in the Senate.”

Senate Republicans saw political damage in the way their House counterparts handled the impeachment issue and are determined not to follow suit, fearing a voter backlash in the 2000 election that could return the Democrats to power.

The proportion of Republican senators whose intensity of feeling on the impeachment question approaches those of House GOP leaders is relatively small. Many of the most ardent proponents of removing Clinton from office, such as former Sens. Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.) and Dan Coats (R-Ind.), either were defeated or retired.

Although it is difficult for some to believe, many senators have been visibly affected by the realization that the impeachment trial is historic. They also expect to be judged by future generations on the fairness and sense of propriety with which the trial is conducted.

‘The Divine Hand of Providence’

In awe-struck tones heard frequently around the Senate chamber last week, Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) told reporters after a closed-door meeting of both parties at which senators hammered out a bipartisan accord on trial procedures that it was almost as if “the divine hand of Providence” had intervened.

“The gravity of the circumstances has weighed heavily on senators,” said Earl Black, a Rice University political science professor.

Some senators, such as Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), have expressed apprehension that dragging in too many of the more salacious details of the president’s affair with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky would only serve to demean the Senate in the eyes of the public and history. Few such institutional concerns appeared to trouble the House.

To be sure, that does not mean that Senate conservatives have not tried to parry Democratic attempts to let the president off the hook. Craig, for example, moved quickly and decisively to shoot down a proposed “bipartisan compromise” that would have provided for an immediate vote on whether to remove Clinton from office--and possibly a speedy end to the trial.

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) bluntly told Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) to scrap a plan that Lott had worked out for truncating the impeachment trial--a move that the more pragmatic majority leader had thought might help Santorum and others in the 2000 election. Effectively, Santorum’s response was thanks, but no thanks.

Conservative Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) was instrumental in crafting a compromise that ultimately was endorsed by all 100 senators, calling for the Senate to hear the House prosecutors present their case first and then take a vote on whether to dismiss the charges or begin hearing witnesses.

And virtually all the conservatives have been quietly buttonholing their colleagues in an effort to make their views known. Even so, insiders said that there has been nothing like the pressure GOP leaders exerted in the House.

Admittedly, there is no guarantee that the decorum will continue. Senate strategists conceded that, if the lawmakers are not yet of a single mind when they begin voting--in late January or early February--the mood still could turn partisan, possibly even ugly.

While Senate Republicans have largely been free of the kind of outside pressures from conservative groups that helped intensify partisan feelings in the House, they may start to get a taste of it soon. While such organizations have held back before, fearing their efforts might backfire, they are preparing to begin lobbying vigorously.

Even in the Senate, one strategist pointed out, such pressures could be difficult to resist. One Senate aide is not holding his breath on how long the Senate’s more dignified, nonpartisan mood will last.

“Until the first time they vote,” he said, hinting that the whole thing could fall apart then. “After that, anything could happen.”