Bumpers Makes Dramatic Plea as Clinton Defense Ends Case

President Clinton’s defense team ended its aggressive, systematic argument against his removal from office Thursday with an extraordinary appeal by former Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-Ark.), who urged his onetime colleagues to “rise above” partisanship and keep the faith with America’s founders.

They intended “high crimes and misdemeanors” to be “distinctly political offenses against the state,” Bumpers said, adding that the president’s conduct in the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal “does not even come close to being an impeachable offense.”

Bumpers delivered his emotional and highly personal appeal even as Senate Democrats intensified their uphill efforts to bring the impeachment trial to an early conclusion.

The afternoon-long White House presentation amounted to a double-barreled strategy of confronting the facts and the law while appealing to the conscience of each senator sitting in judgment of the president.

First David E. Kendall, the president’s personal lawyer, painstakingly laid out a step-by-step argument that Clinton did not commit perjury or obstruct justice while trying to conceal his affair with a former White House intern.

“There are no grounds to remove him from office,” Kendall declared.

He was followed by the just-retired Bumpers, who provided the trial’s most dramatic and emotional moments yet.

Looking around the stilled chamber--but at nobody in particular--Bumpers urged those with “an intense dislike of the president” to rise above it, adding:

“He is not the issue. He will be gone. You won’t. So don’t leave a precedent you almost surely will regret.”

After Bumpers finished, dozens of senators, Republicans and Democrats alike, surged forward to greet him.

Freshly energized by the White House presentation, Democrats made a show of exuding optimism as they pointed to signs that some Republicans may be wavering in their determination to hear from witnesses.

The contentious question of whether to call witnesses is set for debate as early as Monday. Such a decision requires a simple majority of 51 votes. And since there are 55 Republicans and 45 Democrats in the Senate, the presumption has been that the GOP would prevail and witnesses would be called.

But several Republicans said Thursday that they were either undecided or leaning against calling witnesses. Among them were Sens. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, Gordon Smith of Oregon, James M. Jeffords of Vermont and Ted Stevens of Alaska.

“I think there is movement. I think there is still a possibility of witnesses, but the need for them is diminishing as the case seems more and more clear,” Smith said.

Shelby added: “On witnesses, I’d have to be persuaded. I would vote [against witnesses] if I had to vote now. I don’t think I’m alone.”

“Most Republicans, with the exception of a few, are pretty much running in neutral,” said Conrad R. Burns (R-Mont.). He said many Republicans fear that “once you go into depositions, that could lengthen the process by quite a bit.”

Senate Is Urged to Follow Process

The shifting sentiments on Thursday came after three days of a strong White House defense presentation that culminated in Bumpers’ 58-minute speech, which at times had senators laughing out loud, repeatedly breaking the tension in the chamber.

Perhaps fearing a weakening of Republican resolve to press on with the trial, Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) hastily called a news conference after the session adjourned. Inveighing against “a rush to judgment,” he urged senators to resist any impulse to “short circuit” the proceeding.

Hyde also rued that he and his fellow House GOP prosecutors were not given the opportunity to rebut the White House statements. “The last one to speak always has the advantage,” he conceded, adding that his team hopes to rebut some of the White House presentation during the upcoming two days of questions from senators.

Starting today, the trial enters a new phase. After sitting mute through six days of virtually uninterrupted speeches by lawyers for both sides, senators will get to pose questions to House GOP prosecutors and White House lawyers for up to 16 hours.

Kendall focused largely on rebutting the charge that Clinton obstructed justice by trying to find a job for Lewinsky.

Twice, Kendall read from a blow-up of Lewinsky’s grand jury testimony, in which she stated: “No one ever asked me to lie, and I was never promised a job for my silence.”

Then he asked plaintively: “Is there something difficult to understand here?”

Kendall denigrated the House GOP case as one based on “circumstantial evidence” that is “at best profoundly ambiguous.”

He added: “They told you that they had painted a picture with circumstantial evidence. I think what they’ve in fact done is given you a Rorschach test.”

‘Rule of Law Is More Than Rhetoric’

Invoking a phrase used repeatedly by Hyde and other House prosecutors, Kendall said: “The rule of law is more than rhetoric. It means that in proceedings like these, where important rights are being adjudicated, that evidence matters. Fairness matters. Rules of procedural regularity matter. The presumption of innocence matters. And proportionality matters.”

Referring to the allegation framed by House prosecutors as one of “quid pro quo,” Kendall said at one point: “There’s nothing in evidence to support the quo part.”

If the president had truly wanted to silence Lewinsky, Kendall said, “it would have been very easy for the president to have arranged for her to be hired by the White House.”

Bumpers, a noted orator who served six terms in the Senate, had his former colleagues laughing almost from the very start.

Referring to his frequent late-night speeches to an empty chamber, Bumpers remarked: “It is especially pleasant to see an audience which represents about the size of the cumulative audience I had over 24 years.”

After breaking the ice, Bumpers said he was not addressing the Senate on behalf of a dear friend but, rather, “it is the weight of history on all of us and it is my reverence” for the Constitution.

He said it would be “dangerous” to the political process to remove Clinton from office for his conduct in the Lewinsky scandal.

Bumpers then recalled in detail the debates held by America’s founders at the Constitutional Convention over the impeachment clause, offering his interpretation of the events in 1787. The founders, he said, intended “high crimes and misdemeanors” to mean “distinctly political offenses against the state.”

And Clinton’s conduct, Bumpers argued, “does not even come close to being an impeachable offense.”

“The question is how did we come to be here?” he asked. “We are here because the president suffered a terrible moral lapse of marital infidelity, not a breach of the public trust, not a crime against society.

“You can censure Bill Clinton. You can hand him over to the prosecutor for him to be prosecuted. But you cannot convict him. You cannot indulge yourselves the luxury or the right to ignore this history.”

Bumpers did not defend Clinton’s conduct, calling it “indefensible, outrageous, unforgivable, shameless,” and added: “I promise you, the president would not contest any of those [descriptions] or any others.”

Bumpers went on to poignantly describe the suffering by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea.

The Clintons, Bumpers said, are “about as decimated as a family can get. A relationship between husband and wife, father and child has been incredibly strained, if not destroyed.”

Of Chelsea, he added, the president “would happily have died to spare her this or to ameliorate her shame and her grief.”

Bumpers, 73, continued: “The punishment of removing Bill Clinton from office would pale compared to the punishment he has already inflicted on himself.”

Like other speakers before him, including Hyde, Bumpers talked of America’s fallen heroes. Then, in an electric moment, he began calling out by name various senators around the chamber who are war heroes: Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), who lost an arm in Italy; John H. Chafee (R-R.I.), a Marine who fought in Guadalcanal; Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), a Medal of Honor winner who lost part of a leg in Vietnam; and John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was a POW in Hanoi for 5 1/2 years.

Dole’s Censure Proposal Lauded

Bumpers closed by citing Bob Dole, the former Senate Republican leader and another World War II hero, and pointedly reminding senators that Dole, the loser to Clinton in the 1996 presidential election, has advocated a censure of Clinton.

Bumpers called Dole’s proposal “a very reasonable solution to this whole thing that would handle it fairly and expeditiously.”

Today, senators will begin 16 hours of questioning the lawyers for both sides. The senators must submit their written questions to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the trial’s presiding officer.

According to a procedure worked out by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and Minority Leader Tom Daschle, each side will alternate asking questions. The questioning will continue on Saturday.

No time limit has been set for the respondents, but Lott noted that Rehnquist will likely exercise some discretion and cut off verbose replies. As for answers to the questions, Lott expressed the hope that there would not be any “dissertations.”

“The president’s lawyers raised a lot of good questions that have to be answered by the House managers,” said Shelby.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she was impressed by the White House presentation and intends to vote for a Democratic motion to dismiss the case, if it is offered next week.

On the question of witnesses, Lott said, “we’re continuing to talk to each other across the aisle. Republicans and Democrats are thinking through and discussing what we’re learning. But we have no agreement.”

Times staff writers Marc Lacey and Janet Hook contributed to this story.

President Clinton’s State of the Union address and his defense team’s presentation have seized the momentum from the GOP’s impeachment efforts, says Times Washington correspondent Marc Lacey. Hear his audio reporter’s notebook on The Times’ Web site:

https://www.latimes.com/impeach