Word: starrs
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...Starr cannot be persuaded to sanction a deal, there are two ways around him--one short, one much longer. Congress could grant Clinton immunity from prosecution in exchange for a deal. Such protections have gone before to people like Oliver North in exchange for their cooperation. Starr might not like that outcome, but there wouldn't be much he could do about it. Or Clinton might be persuaded to take his chances in court after leaving office, betting that any jury would feel that he had already paid his debt. If he is lucky, if he has not completely exhausted...
...this crucial moment it is not clear that anyone with stature also has the means and the will to nail down a deal. Early last week Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, a friend of Starr's, tried to lay the foundation; he spent 20 minutes on the phone with Clinton, and though he didn't speak to Starr, has a good sense of how the guy ticks. Hatch imagined that the country might be spared a year of unnecessary public hanging if Clinton confessed more publicly and contritely than before, if the House agreed to a censure, and if Starr could...
...House Judiciary Committee hasn't even begun to get down to substance, but verdicts-by-sound-bite from its members are already rolling in. Republican Bill McCollum has declared himself "shocked and disgusted" by the apparent "lurid sexual behavior" detailed in the Starr report. Democrat Maxine Waters has blasted Ken Starr, whose report the committee will be weighing, as "the poster boy for unethical prosecutors." Republican bomb thrower Bob Barr has attacked Clinton's "systemic abuses" of the "political process" and demanded an inquiry into his impeachment--and that was last year, before the Monica Lewinsky scandal even broke...
This toxic mix means that committee members are already happily screaming past one another on the questions put before them by the Starr report. They will find occasions to fight over almost everything, notably about how much the committee will rely on the Starr report for its decisions. Chairman Henry Hyde has said there is no need to "reinvent the wheel." But Frank has characterized the report as "the most negative case possible." Will the committee call its own witnesses? Will it ask Clinton or Lewinsky to testify? Should it consider censure or limit itself to impeachment...
...instincts. They claim that he has a radical antiabortion agenda--his most famous namesake is the Hyde amendment banning federal funding of most Medicaid abortions--and is too eager to do Newt Gingrich's bidding. "It's just not worked out," Frank says of Hyde's tenure in the Starr-report era. "Whether it's because the Republican leadership has overridden him or what, I don't know, but Henry has not been bipartisan...