Word: trialing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Republican caucus late Thursday afternoon, some members argued for total war--a party-line vote to proceed however they chose. The Democrats were doing Clinton's bidding, they argued, and would never go along with a bipartisan deal; they were counting on a long trial to make Republicans look partisan and obsessed. The fear of a voter backlash was no reason to abandon principle. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who won with just 49% of the vote in 1994, told the conference, "I'm up in 2000. And if you read the papers, I'm an endangered Republican species...
...that both are true. Any vote that turns out 100 to 0 in the Senate is by definition symbolic. But on an issue as explosive as the trial of a popular President during an age of vengeance in a Senate controlled by the opposition party, no vote is easy. There are surely votes ahead that will divide the caucus, strain party loyalties, test principle against politics and test both against the law. But this vote was much harder than the final tally suggests...
...Democrats, meanwhile, were aware that if Clinton could not get a fair trial in a G.O.P.-controlled Senate, it would be in part because of what the Democrats did to Robert Bork and John Tower, and to the methods the Democratic majority had long used to undercut Republican administrations. "If we can't do this," an off-message Democratic Senator said Thursday night, "we're all to blame." And so they agreed to try one last time to pull back from the brink...
...senators listened to their most respected historian, Robert Byrd, warn them that they too were on trial. The President had sullied the presidency; the House had fallen "into the black pit of partisan self-indulgence." The Senate needed to lift its eyes to higher things. Byrd quoted Ben Franklin, the Federalist papers, even Chaucer. Then the deal guys saved...
...Phil Gramm and Ted Kennedy who persuaded their colleagues that they could agree on the basic approach, to let the trial open with arguments and questions and then decide which, if any, witnesses to call. That the Texas conservative and the Massachusetts liberal--"the most unlikely combination you could imagine," as Collins called them--could agree on anything suggests one of two things: either the compromise was hollow and symbolic, or something rare and impressive occurred...