Posted on 12/19/2019 9:17:37 PM PST by DoodleBob
Twenty-one years ago Thursday, as the House approved articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was sitting in his study in Pascagoula, Miss., "looking out on a beautiful live oak tree." With a sigh, the Republican leader picked up the phone to call Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, his Democratic counterpart.
"Whether we like it or not, this is sitting in our lap," he told Daschle, "and we've got to figure out how to deal with it."
Lott was a skilled vote-counter.
"I knew the votes were not there and were never gonna be there to remove Bill Clinton," he says. "So what I had to figure out, working with Tom, was: How do we fulfill our constitutional responsibility in a respectable way?"
Meanwhile, the Senate staff — parliamentarians, floor aides, even furniture-makers — were frantically preparing.
Harkening back to 1868 for the 1999 rules
First, each staffer got a copy of the journal from the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson.
"The journal is a sports metaphor. It's an instant replay of the Senate," observes Marty Paone, who was Daschle's top aide on the Senate floor. "If the journal doesn't have it, it didn't happen." It is the shorthand version, later transcribed, of every agreement, every statement that occurs. And the journal of Andrew Johnson's trial became the guide for the trial of William Jefferson Clinton.
There were some modern additions, too: a direct Lott-Daschle hotline was installed so the two leaders could talk to each other at a moment's notice, and without anyone else involved. Throughout the process, they talked daily, sometimes hourly.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
There has already been an offer made by the republicans to try this impeachment exactly as they tried clinton but that is not good enough for nancy. she wants to call the shots in the senate as well and that is never going to happen.
Not what they said when it was going on.
Nina Totenberg??!!!
Really??!!!
ROFL!
That was when the GOP was the media poodle.
Nina should have prefaced her article with a discussion on how the House investigated Clinton in a ‘respectable way’.
A partisan investigation deserves no less than a quick dismissal. McConnell is correct: anything less would devalue the Constitution and the Senate’s role in the process.
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