Word: lott
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...that it has, Lott has the chance to be the leader who brings the scandal to a dignified conclusion. But he's not particularly happy about the opportunity. Lott knows that no matter what he does, he'll be attacked--"bashed by the left," he told TIME, or "criticized by people on the right." But he also knows that the outcome--and how the process will be judged by both the public and history--depends largely on him. "I realize that there's plenty of room to handle it properly or improperly," he said. "And I'm going...
That is the elegance in the Lott proposal. After the mini-trial, there would be two votes on whether to conduct a full-blown trial, each requiring a two-thirds vote to go ahead. In the probable event they would fail, the trial would adjourn and the Senate would take up censure. Temporarily setting aside the messy issue of how to craft a censure resolution that would satisfy all sides, the obsessively punctilious Lott had devised an exit strategy that seemed to have something in it for everyone. Conservatives would get a trial, albeit a brief one, and a chance...
...Lott to succeed with his or any other plan, he'll have to placate not only Hyde and his fellow House prosecutors but also conservatives within his own caucus in the Senate. Suspicious that their leader is in the process of cutting an accommodating prefab deal--just as he did during last year's budget negotiations--some conservatives, like Inhofe, are already rebelling. To be done with the unpleasant duty of the trial, they claim, Lott is running roughshod over the Constitution and the rule of law, all in the service of rescuing the President. "Trent cannot be perceived...
Another obstacle in Lott's way is his own propensity to blurt things out that he'd be better off keeping to himself--what a G.O.P. Senator described last week as "Trent's foot-in-mouth disease." It struck last summer, when Lott compared homosexuality to alcoholism and kleptomania, and again in mid-December, when he attacked the President's motives for launching air strikes on Iraq. Then it appeared one more time last week, when Lott went public with the outline of his plan for a streamlined impeachment trial without warning anyone on his staff, clearing it with...
...fact, Lott began thinking about ways he could avert a full-blown Senate trial in the days before the House voted to impeach Clinton on Dec. 19. "Trent has no interest in helping Bill Clinton," says a senior G.O.P. Senate official who knows Lott well. "But Trent wants to run the Senate. He doesn't want this thing screwing up the whole year." Lott also knew he couldn't scotch a trial entirely without enraging conservatives. So he went on television three weeks ago to insist that there would be a trial and "there won't be any dealmaking...