Senate Debates Dismissal in Closed-Door Session

The Senate went behind closed doors Monday to debate a proposal to dismiss President Clinton’s impeachment trial, even as lawmakers from both parties failed to resolve the volatile issue of whether witnesses should be called.

Senators today finally will confront the witness question, but the vote on it and the dismissal motion may not come until Wednesday.

Although a significant number of Republicans have expressed doubts about the need for witnesses, the outcome of the issue remains in doubt and looms as the deciding factor on whether the trial could end as soon as this week.

Either way, as a sign that Clinton is confident of winning the case, the White House announced Monday evening that it would ignore a list of 10 written questions submitted by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and other Republicans seeking more clarification on the president’s conduct in the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal.

Monday night’s private session lasted more than four hours, quietly breaking up about 10 p.m. EST. None of the lawmakers commented on it, in sharp contrast to the trial’s public phases, when many senators have emerged from the chamber and made a beeline for microphones and cameras.

Senate rules require members to maintain secrecy when conducting confidential business, under penalty of expulsion from the body. In a Capitol subway car carrying five senators after the private session adjourned, one told a reporter jokingly: “If we told you what happened, we’d have to kill you.”

Several senators left before the session ended, including Lott.

On the Senate floor earlier in the day, House Republican managers and attorneys for the White House offered their arguments for and against the motion filed by Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) to end the trial.

Rep. Charles T. Canady (R-Fla.), one of the House managers, or prosecutors, maintained that even though Clinton has admitted some personal failings after belatedly acknowledging his affair with Lewinsky, the president has not said that he committed perjury or obstructed justice--the two elements of the articles of impeachment that seek to remove him from office.

“Where is the repentance?” Canady asked. “Where is the contrition?”

But Clinton attorney Nicole Seligman, arguing that the articles do not meet the constitutional standard of high crimes or misdemeanors, said that the charges are too broad and the facts too shallow against the president.

“End this trial now,” she repeatedly challenged the Senate. “We ask you to end this trial now.”

The dismissal motion is widely expected to fail, with the vote largely mirroring the Senate’s partisan breakdown of 55 Republicans and 45 Democrats.

Before starting their closed-door debate on the motion, the Senate overwhelmingly rebuffed a proposal to conduct their discussions in public.

Outside the Senate chamber’s high double doors, the day was marked by a fast-paced, confusing flurry of intensified efforts to reach a bipartisan agreement on how to bring the trial to a dignified and early finale.

An initial plan to shut down the trial without witnesses was slapped aside by Republicans. Then a host of alternative proposals for limiting the scope and duration of the trial floated through congressional hallways.

But no single plan was embraced by a majority of senators.

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) was discouraged by the lack of progress. “There is no movement. I’m very disturbed. There ought to be movement to have an exit strategy that’s honorable.”

White House Upset at Plan’s Rejection

At the White House, spokesman Joe Lockhart was upset that the bipartisan plan barring witnesses was turned down by the GOP. He said it could have brought this case “to a conclusion in an expedited way.”

The pressures mounting in and around the Senate chamber were so pervasive that at one point Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) broke into a crowd of reporters surrounding one GOP senator, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, to find out what Republicans were thinking.

The two were so eager to have an informal negotiating session about what it would take to bring the two sides together that they proceeded to do so, despite the presence of dozens of reporters.

The effort to find a middle ground began with a longshot early in the day when Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) suggested closing the trial this week by simply eliminating votes and debate on motions to dismiss and call witnesses.

Under their proposal, House managers would be granted their request to rebut contentions made by Clinton’s defense team last week, followed by closing arguments, a period for Senate deliberations in private and a public vote on the articles of impeachment.

Lieberman said that he devised the plan with Gorton because “as the day ended on Saturday, the Senate was headed exactly in the direction we had hoped it would not go--to confrontation and divisions along party lines.”

“There is a growing bipartisan feeling that we’re just about to the point where we’ve heard enough to reach a fair decision,” Lieberman said.

Lott and his Democratic counterpart, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, took the proposal to their respective caucuses. Democrats embraced it. Most Republicans rejected it as a premature effort to cut off debate about whether to call witnesses.

Asked how it was received by the GOP caucus, Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.), a leader of the Senate’s most conservative faction, said: “Not particularly well.”

But Republicans were continuing to look for ways to bring the trial to a quick conclusion--probably by finding some way to compress the witness list, limit the time taken to depose witnesses and avoid calling any of them to the Senate floor.

“We want to make sure it’s very limited,” said Grassley, “and not necessarily on the floor of the Senate.”

One idea being discussed among Republicans would call for separate votes on whether the charges against Clinton are proved and whether he should be removed from office. By structuring the vote that way, Lott spokesman John Czwartacki said, it would allow senators to “reconcile their sense that there is merit to the charges brought before the Senate but doubt [that] those charges merit the constitutional death penalty.”

Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) expressed doubt that Democrats would embrace such a plan. “It’s hard for me to imagine we’d go along with something like that.”

Gramm Meets With Kennedy

Among the day’s efforts to reach a compromise: Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) stopped by the office of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and proposed calling only two witnesses, then ending the trial by a specific date. Gramm stopped by again after discussing it with the GOP leadership. Kennedy rebuffed him on both occasions. “It was a nonstarter,” said Kennedy. “I said: ‘It makes no sense.”’

The most dramatic moment on the floor came when the clerk of the Senate read the dismissal motion proposed by Byrd. Cast in the arcane language of legislative motions, it was short and to the point:

“The articles of impeachment against William Jefferson Clinton, the president of the United States, be and the same are duly dismissed.”

One of the House managers, Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.), said it was wrong to end the trial at this point.

“It would be damaging to the Constitution because the Senate would fail to try the case,” he said. “It would be harmful to the body politic because there is no resolution of the issues of the case.”

He added that he as much as anyone wants an end to the saga. “Let me assure you that I want this over,” he said.

He then pointed to one of Clinton’s closest confidants from Arkansas, Deputy White House Counsel Bruce Lindsey, at the nearby defense table.

“As Bruce Lindsey sitting over here will probably attest,” Hutchinson said, “this is bad for me politically. I’m from Arkansas, the state Bill Clinton dominated politically for years, and certainly our most influential politician.

“But we do have our responsibilities and I happen to believe that we should follow the process which is dictated by the Constitution and the facts.”

The most important fact, he said, is that when Lewinsky was placed on the witness list in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton, “the truth became a threat to the president.”

“He tried to avoid the truth at all costs and was willing to obstruct the legal processes of the judicial system in order to protect himself.”

Voice From Past Enters Debate

Speaking for the president, Seligman urged passage of the dismissal motion.

“You have listened. You have heard,” she told the senators. “The case cannot be made. It is time to end it.”

She recalled Sen. William Pitt Fessenden writing 131 years ago on the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. Fessenden asserted, she said, that “impeachment should be free from the taint of party and leave no ground for suspicion upon the motives of those who inflict the penalty.”

His words, she said, echoed those of Alexander Hamilton at the birth of the nation, who warned of “the greatest danger” in allowing partisanship to have the upper hand in impeachment considerations rather than “the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”

In the case against Clinton, she maintained, there has been no harm to the government, a key standard for deciding whether to remove a president.

“Here is the point,” she said. “Impeachment is not meant to punish an individual. It is a protection for the people. In Alexander Hamilton’s words, ‘A remedy for great injuries done to the society itself.’ ”

Making the final argument against dismissal by the managers was Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

“A trial as I understand it is a search for truth,” he said. It should not be “trumped by a search for exit strategies.”

He implored: “Vote these articles up or down. That’s the only way to get this issue behind us.”

With that, the Senate considered a proposal by Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) that their colleagues break with tradition and open the deliberations on the dismissal motion.

Taxpayers, Harkin noted, “are footing the bill here. They have every right to have these doors open.”

The measure, which needed a two-thirds majority to pass, did not come close, losing 57 to 43.

Three Republicans voted with Democrats to open the debate. Five Democrats voted with Republicans to keep it closed. California Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein voted to keep it open.

Donald A. Ritchie, associate historian of the Senate, said that secrecy is not new to the Senate. The Constitution does not require that Congress meet in open session and, during the first five years of the republic, the Senate met in closed session.

The last time the entire Senate met behind closed doors was in April 1997, when it debated the chemical weapons convention treaty, which was later ratified.

Before the deliberations, Senate Republicans sent a memo to the White House asking the president to answer 10 categories of questions involving his role in the scandal.

Clinton Lawyer Shifts on Queries

On Saturday, Gregory Craig, special counsel for the president, had said during the trial’s question-and-answer period that the president would entertain written questions. But the White House quickly balked and said that only Clinton’s lawyers would take the questions.

Among them was whether “everything” he testified to was true in the Jones case, if he lied to White House aides about his sexual involvement with Lewinsky and “who ordered and paid for” an instant public opinion poll by former political aide Dick Morris on how he should respond to the scandal when it first broke a year ago.

The GOP senators wanted the president to personally answer the questions because they “concern his state of mind or facts that only he is privy to.”

Jim Kennedy, spokesman for the White House Counsel’s office, said that Clinton’s lawyers had been prepared to take questions from the floor Monday. But there would be no response to the written questions, he said.

Times staff writers Edwin Chen, Marc Lacey and Art Pine contributed to this story.

Hear Times political writer Ronald Brownstein discuss the political pressures influencing the impeachment process. His audio analysis is on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/impeach