New Sign of GOP Failure

With its two procedural votes Wednesday, the Senate signaled unmistakably that the effort to convict President Clinton of high crimes and misdemeanors and remove him from office has failed. By 56 to 44, with Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin the only Democrat aligning himself with the Republican majority, the Senate voted not to dismiss the charges against Clinton. It then voted, by identical numbers, to take depositions from witnesses the House impeachment managers are eager to hear. The significance for the outcome of the trial lay in the first vote. If 44 Democrats are ready to drop the case against Clinton right now, it assures that the 67 votes needed to convict him are demonstrably beyond reach.

The numbers should have encouraged a shorter trial. But the maneuvering in fact means it will drag on, possibly beyond the additional 10 days or so that Sen. Trent Lott, the majority leader, says he foresees. The House managers originally wanted to depose 10 or more witnesses in an effort to seal some of the holes in their case and in hope of swaying any doubters. Weary senators told them they could examine three witnesses and no more. But even limiting the list to what House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) lugubriously refers to as “a pitiful three” doesn’t assure an early windup to this case.

White House lawyers say that to assure Clinton a proper defense could require that they comb through thousands of pages of still-secret documents generated by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s office and follow that by calling witnesses of their own. Some Republicans dismiss that as an empty threat, and so it might be. But if the White House insists that fairness demands the chance to mount a complete rebuttal of the charges, it will surely find public opinion strongly on its side.

It is not at all clear what the House managers expect to gain by deposing Monica S. Lewinsky, Clinton’s friend Vernon Jordan and his aide, Sidney Blumenthal, all of whom have previously testified at length before a grand jury. To talk, as more than one manager has done, of being able to confront a witness and gaze deeply into that person’s eyes is not a sound legal strategy but an excuse for not having one. Do the managers really expect that anything new can be learned from the witnesses, that their statements will produce a smoking gun, elicit a confession or otherwise detonate a bombshell? The managers’ insistence on going over the same old ground with the same familiar witnesses in the hope that something conclusively incriminating might emerge is an implicit admission of desperation, not a sign of legal or political confidence. It is, to borrow a word from Henry Hyde, pathetic.