Senate Packwood Hearing Carries into Second Day
The Senate, facing an unprecedented confrontation with one of its members, wrestled Monday with whether to go to court to force Republican Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon to turn over hundreds of pages of personal diaries as part of an ethics committee investigation into allegations of sexual harassment and possible criminal wrongdoing.
After seven hours of often tedious debate over legal technicalities and constitutional questions, the Senate retired for the night, its leaders vowing to vote sometime Tuesday on whether to support the committee's effort to obtain the diaries by subpoena.
So sensitive was the issue that by nightfall Monday no senator had openly defended Packwood, although several had raised legal points on his behalf. And while only a few indicated how they would vote, informal comments by others demonstrated that Packwood faces an uphill fight in his effort to persuade the Senate to side with him on privacy grounds.
"We are being tested here," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. "Let's tell the American people we are not going to cover up and we're not going to have a double standard.
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