Conflicting Forces Place GOP on Political Tightrope

Despite a growing sense of inevitability--even futility--about the outcome of President Clinton’s impeachment trial, Senate Republicans are still struggling against powerful crosscurrents to bring this process to conclusion with dignity and dispatch.

In a long day of agonizing meetings Monday, they found themselves squirming between fundamentally incompatible forces: their reluctance to precipitate a full-scale partisan confrontation with Senate Democrats and their fear of alienating the GOP’s conservative base.

The tortured--and so far unsuccessful--hunt for a formula that could somehow satisfy both those goals underscores the excruciating political choices facing the GOP. “At this point, for Republicans there are only bad choices,” said GOP pollster Jan van Lohuizen.

The tension is coming to a head this week as the Senate steams toward two crucial votes: on dismissing the case and on whether to call witnesses. The dismissal motion almost assuredly will fail, but the witness question could extend the unpopular impeachment trial along strict party lines.

Hoping to avoid that, several Republican senators have begun to question publicly why the trial should be prolonged with witnesses if a test vote on dismissing the case, most likely Wednesday, indicates that the House managers have no chance of acquiring the 67 votes they need to convict and remove Clinton from office.

If all, or virtually all, of the 45 Democratic senators vote for the motion by Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) to dismiss the case, as now seems likely, “It’s a message that the trial is basically over with,” conservative Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) said Monday.

Yet even with the prospect of removing Clinton all but vanished, pressure remains strong in the GOP to move forward with witnesses. That’s based partly on the belief that the Constitution demands an unabridged trial and partly on the longshot hope that the witnesses might provide some new bombshell that would explode Clinton’s defenses.

But another potent force may be a widespread belief among conservatives that a Senate decision to end the case without calling witnesses would strengthen Democratic efforts in 2000 to portray the House vote to impeach Clinton as unwarranted.

“It is much more dangerous to Republicans to now pull the plug . . . to make it seem as, ‘Oh well, I guess we made a mistake. The House just made a mistake,’ ” GOP strategist Bill Kristol, the publisher of the conservative Weekly Standard, said Sunday.

Senate GOP Paying Political Price

Several Republicans have echoed Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), who has said that, while he personally sees no need for calling witnesses, he will vote for whatever House prosecutors think they need. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), who has been involved in efforts to craft an exit strategy for the trial, has said that one of his aims is to avoid “kicking the House in the teeth.”

But Senate Republicans have paid some political price for giving House Republicans great leeway in conducting the trial. For instance, the much vaunted spirit of bipartisanship in the Senate was put in jeopardy over the weekend when House Republicans went to court to force Monica S. Lewinsky to submit to an interview before the witness issue is settled.

These conflicting considerations have left Senate Republicans in roughly the same position as they were during the 1995 government shutdown: uneasy about the House’s course but fearful that they will inspire a backlash from the party’s base if they seem to undercut the House’s hard-line approach. It did not make things any easier that Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), the leader of the House managers, openly complained about a lack of “respect” from the Senate in his floor statement Monday opposing the case’s dismissal.

“The balancing act [for the Senate] is how far do you have to go to legitimize the House versus how far do you go to push forward a process in which there seems to be no possibility of removing [Clinton] from office?” said GOP pollster Bill McInturff.

In searching for that balance, most Senate Republicans still seem ready to support the House demand for at least some witnesses. But that support is fraying to the point where Republicans say it no longer is assured that a vote to subpoena witnesses will win a majority, assuming that all or virtually all Democrats vote against it. “There is a reason to wonder” if the votes are there, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) said Monday.

That’s partly because some Republicans are skeptical that the House has truly proved its case and partly because there is a wider uncertainty in GOP circles about whether witnesses would really augment the proceeding’s voluminous record. That uncertainty intensified Monday after Lewinsky’s lawyers said that she added nothing new in her interview with House prosecutors Sunday.

Managers Confront Political Realities

But the biggest problem facing the House managers is political: the fear among some Senate Republicans that it makes little sense to call witnesses when there is virtually no chance of convicting Clinton--and a measurable risk of provoking the public by extending the process on a party-line basis. In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Organization poll last weekend, two-thirds of Americans said that the Senate should proceed to a final vote on the impeachment articles without calling witnesses--and 64% said that they continued to oppose Clinton’s removal.

Yet throughout this process, most congressional Republicans have ignored such numbers. Instead, they have been driven by a different set of considerations--constitutional, legal and political--all of which are present again as the Senate faces its difficult choices this week.

Toward the front of that line is a sense of constitutional obligation. Senators are nothing if not devoted to process, procedure and, especially on an occasion like this, a heightened sense of their institution’s importance in history.

Even if the Senate vote on dismissal makes it painfully obvious that there are not enough votes to convict Clinton, many senators think they cannot forgo witnesses without giving short shrift to the impeachment process, the Constitution and history.

Some Fear Angering Conservative Base

Reinforcing that sense of obligation are two political calculations: one offensive and one defensive.

The defensive calculation is the fear of alienating the conservative base by denying the House managers their demand for witnesses. In fact, tolerance for extending the case appears to be eroding even among the broad mass of rank-and-file Republicans. Strikingly, in the poll last weekend, only 48% of Republicans urged the Senate to call witnesses, while 49% said that it should move immediately to an up-or-down vote on the impeachment articles themselves.

Less powerful but still present is a belief that calling witnesses might represent an opportunity for the GOP to take the offense. Some see witnesses as a chance to dramatically portray Clinton’s misbehavior in a way that rehabilitates the GOP’s image, even if it does not necessarily increase support for the president’s removal.