Culture Vultures: The Senate's Footstool Fops
Steyn, Mark
by Mark Steyn The Senate's Footstool Fops I 've been spending a lot of time in the United States Senate recently, mainly because of the president's impeachment trial (you must have heard about it;...
...The page had barely dropped off Senator Harkin's question when Edward Kennedy, the coughing, heaving, bloated senator from Massachusetts, called him over...
...Great debates have that tension, that crackle that only comes when someone's thinking on his feet before a body of his peers...
...It would be ludicrous to expect Teddy Kennedy to be concerned about the civil rights of someone like Paula Jones: The president had a "problem," he got his people to "fix" it— just like Kennedys have been doing in Massachusetts for three generations...
...Never mind bipartisan, that's tripartisan, baby—just the way I like it...
...Senator Kennedy didn't thank him...
...It's hard to see how Clinton could have hand-picked a hundred guys more eager to dodge their constitutional responsibility than this lot is...
...01' Strom cast an appreciative bipartisan eye over the petite brunette liberal extremist and then gave my elbow an affectionate squeeze, perhaps having mistaken it for hers, but who knows...
...But once they're in there, they're suddenly given the vast retinues of an eighteenth-century Duke...
...Instead, it turns out they make it up as they go along: You can have three witnesses, no African-American women, no sex questions, video only, and just for three hours...
...Imagine a Senate entirely appointed by President Clinton, with row upon row upon row of Barbara Boxers stretching back as far as the eye can see...
...But mostly what they revere is other senators...
...At Westminster, there's nowhere to go but the bar or the chamber...
...The Senate Democrats adored it, especially the bits about the first family, "a family that has already been about as decimated as a family can get," roared Senator Bumpers...
...I thought...
...So those various Clinton lady friends who testified anonymously in the Paula Jones depositions cannot be permitted in the well of the chamber...
...Bob Kerrey and that sad old busted flush Pat Moynihan heard their colleague far away in their suites of offices in the Hart and Dirksen buildings and zipped over via the Senate's underground railway to chip in their two bits' worth, also to an empty chamber...
...For a quarter-century, received wisdom in London and Ottawa has had it that Watergate was a vindication of the American Constitution: The system asserted itself, disgorged Richard Nixon, and moved on...
...With hindsight, it was a brilliant choice by the Clinton team...
...He digs chicks—all sizes, all shapes, all ages: airhead Valley Girls like Monica, twangy trailer trash like Paula, elegant widows like Kathleen, beauty queens, black hookers, you name 'em, he's hit on 'em...
...But Senator Bumpers did the trick, prompting a veritable stampede to join Bill Clinton's mambo line...
...It'll be a cold day in hell before you hear "Senator John D. Rock-efeller IV, meet Jane Doe #5" on the Senate floor...
...Didn't you see the tape...
...We are not interested in a pornographic movie...
...In a Westminster-style parliamentary monarchy, we were told, such a thing would not be possible: The Royal Prerogative gives a prime minister too much power and subjects him to hardly any checks and balances...
...And where did it get the GOP...
...50 March 1999 The American Spectator...
...Don't tell me he's going to do the full Monica...
...But he waved me through anyway and directed me to someone who told me to go to someone else who gave me a card to take to someone else and, as usual in any federal building, soon I was wandering from floor to floor, office to office, trying to find the guy who could issue me with a valid ID, only by this time I didn't need any valid ID because I pretty well had the run of the place...
...They're still being denounced as partisan extremists, and or Trent's being reviled by the nation's liberal columnists as a white supremacist...
...the entire trial without ever acquiring the proper ID...
...In Britain, commentators regularly use the term "presidential" to describe Blair's style of governing, but, of course, he wields far more power as the Queen's first minister than Clinton could ever dream of...
...Whatever the Senate was when the Framers entrusted it with the sole power to try impeachment, today it's about as unsuited as you could devise...
...The House of Lords may give Britain's grandest families a permanent seat in Parliament, but, in return, your average marquess or viscount finds himself consigned to the perpetual discomfort of a third-rate boarding school...
...After the speech, even ol' Dale revised his bleak portrait of pain and agony in the Clinton household...
...What do you think about me...
...But come the State of the Union, the president was here, and David's ID-less access was impeded by, oh, all of six minutes...
...It was a Saturday afternoon, a busy one for the Senate pages...
...they revere this great Republic, and they revere its history...
...To Democrats, "bipartisanism" means what "peace" meant to old-school Soviet apparatchiks: the absence of opposition...
...On my first day, I wandered in the main door without any ID and was told by the guard I had to use the side entrance, which was sealed off with yellow tape...
...Naturally, there's nothing as bipartisan as a former senator...
...Republican senators, by contrast, seem to have sublimated their wilder sexual urges in a kinky fetishization of "bipartisanism...
...The page silently padded over to the senator's seat in the back, Ted whispered to him, and the page made his way to the end of the row, then worked his way along the row in front, squeezing past senators until he was directly facing Ted's desk...
...The Senate's ponderous self-absorption is the merest variant on the old egotist's crack: "But enough about me...
...The page turned around, squeezed past Senator Graham of The American Spectator March 1999 49 Florida yet again and dropped to his knees to move Ted's footrest another smidgeonette...
...It seems an appropriate comment on the contortions required of Clintonian feminism that, in this instance at least, "No" does indeed mean "Yes...
...0 ne of the most admirable qualities of this president is his very personal commitment to diversity...
...Constitution created very precise mechanisms that automatically come into play...
...There's been nothing but mental agony, sleepless nights...
...A trial is intended to proceed to a result...
...I'm sorry that people took that literally," he said...
...IMPEACH THE GOP...
...Maybe back home Bill and Hill are watching al' Dale and roaring with laughter...
...You won't find a Lord with a "staffer" or an "aide": There's no such thing...
...Out goes the House of Lords, with its motheaten Dukes and Earls...
...Ah-ha...
...What do you think about my dignity...
...The real battle has not been between the accused and his accusers, but between the trial and the Senate's absurd sense of itself...
...So the pages were run off their feet ferrying lethal interjections from chief saboteurs Harkin and Pat Leahy up to Democrat leader Tom Daschle...
...And the speaker would ensure that the backbencher got a proper answer and not just the standard Clinton press-conference formulations of "I have admitted to inappropriate behavior in my private life," and "It's time to end the politics of personal destruction (now that there's no one left in the GOP worth personally destroying...
...My God...
...When I marveled at this admirable openness, certainly when compared with Britain or Canada, he said, "Well, don't forget, in London and Ottawa, the prime minister is there in Parliament...
...But no...
...He's not any kind of supremacist...
...the Senateprefers backstage deals...
...I'm with you there," I said to the large African-American lady waving the latter...
...You're hard put to find an upscale bordello or bondage dungeon without some peer or other hanging upside down in the basement...
...she'd meant to vote "Yes...
...48 March 1999 The American Spectator 0 em, democratic, Blairite "Senate," with its members appointed by, er, Blair...
...Nor would he trouble himself much over Bill and Monica's "consensual relationship": It was very consensual...
...How many businesses in Iowa have five branch offices...
...Good for you, honey," she said...
...But enough about my dignity...
...instead, he leaned under the senator's desk and adjusted Ted's footrest by an inch and a half...
...He then dropped to his knees...
...We gotta put a stop to these partisan extremists...
...What clause did that come from...
...If the president were here, security would be much tighter...
...read another...
...The president's relationship with his wife and daughter has been "destroyed...
...Almost immediately, she stood up and announced that she'd made a mistake...
...The guy was squeezing his way back past the other senators, Leahy having some other brazenly irrelevant question he needed taken to the minority leader, when Ted signaled him back...
...One scene from the Senate trial sums up the entire chamber, even though it's not, in any sense, political...
...But to Republicans it means being permanently at the receiving end of a political S&M relationship...
...Covering the president's little difficulties for Britain's Daily Telegraph and Canada's National Post, I regularly found myself pondering the differences between a parliamentary democracy and the U.S...
...Not only did she eagerly service Clinton, but she agreed to let the president place her in legal jeopardy and conscript her to his conspiracy—just as obliging nobodies have been willing to do for the Kennedys for years...
...It's no particular secret that there are several members of the House of Lords with various outré tastes...
...The GOP's Senate leadership caved in to the Dems on everything—restricting the presentation of the House case, tightening the conditions for witnesses, limiting the names on the list—to the point where, according to how strongly you feel, they were either grossly neglecting their Constitutional duty or actively joining in the president's conspiracy to obstruct justice...
...I thought from up in the gallery...
...And though few members of the chamber are as grand as the senior senator from Massachusetts, his values have seeped into its bloodstream: Senators seemed all but incapable of lowering their sights to the humble citizens—the Paula Joneses and Kathleen Willeysclustered round their footstools...
...They were, inevitably, pro-Clinton: "IMPEACH KEN STARR...
...By contrast, the Senate is full of almost endearingly unexceptional people—from a talent pool of some 250 million, we select a Hot loo including Blanche Lincoln and Richard Shelby...
...Based on my observation, I think they're coping pretty well...
...said one placard...
...The Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, let his opposite number railroad him into agreeing to trial rules unknown to the Anglo-American legal tradition and a travesty of all previous Senate impeachment procedures...
...I'd like to impeach the Republican leadership for not being partisan and extremist enough, certainly not as partisan and extremist as those crazy Democrats hanging in lockstep off the presidential zipper...
...in comes the modHow inconsiderate of the House GOP to importune them...
...Maybe he's right, but who knows...
...But they were the exception...
...We've always understood that the difference between a Westminster system and the United States is that the framers of the U.S...
...Quite simply, the British Constitution makes no provision for it...
...But, curiously enough, young or old, rich or poor, smart or dumb, none of them seems to fall into any category of womanhood that Democrats give a hoot about...
...Tom Harkin's definition of "impartial justice" extends to plotting strategy on the phone with the president most nights and, during the question-and-answer session, passing notes to White House counsel Greg Craig to tip him off to his questions...
...For example, he's just about to abolish one house of the legislature and replace it with one more to his taste...
...A trial is, by definition, adversarial...
...In how many other countries can a guy just wander in off the street and find himself in a three-way with two senators...
...As the eternally agonized Alabammmy Senator Richard Shelby puts it, "What we are interested in is dignity in the Senate...
...In both Lords and Commons, there aren't enough offices to go round, so even theheavyweights of British politics find themselves crammed together in poky, fitfully heated cubbyholes sharing one lame secretary between twelve...
...But what's the Republican response...
...Senators revere the Constitution...
...There was a moment during the trial's very first vote when it looked as though Barbara Mikulski, alone among the Senate's impeccably feminist Democrats, had reconsidered endorsing her president's recklessness: She voted "No" on the motion to dismiss the impeachment case...
...That's why the World's Greatest Deliberative Body is so hopeless at deliberating...
...By definition, "bipartisanship" can only ever mean a Republican adopting the Democrat position...
...Constitution...
...T he other big difference is office furniture...
...it was on several cable networks...
...Amery's speech derived its force from the fact that his fellow Tories were present...
...Under the cumbersome impeachment procedures, senators had to submit questions to their respective party leaders, who then passed them to the Chief Justice, who then read them out...
...Er, to be honest, that's not quite what I meant...
...Within minutes, I found myself squeezed between Senators Strom Thurmond and Barbara Boxer...
...He then rushed off to pick up Senator Leahy's note...
...That's not the Framers...
...The more they prostrate and abase themselves before the Democrats and the media in an effort to be "moderate" and "bipartisan," the more the Democrat dominatrixes walk all over them in studded boots, sneering at them for their "partisan extremism...
...The much vaunted constitutional "checks and balances" have proved all but useless in the face of a president who's unchecked and Democratic senators who sound increasingly unbalanced...
...After that florid display of Arkansas hogswill by Clinton character witness Dale Bumpers, there wasn't a wet eye in the House impeachment managers: They sat there stony-faced...
...The House managers were in the impossible position of trying to land "Jerry Springer" reruns on "Masterpiece Theatre...
...As his friend and president would say, it depends what the meaning of the word "destroyed" is...
...Compare Leo Amery's call for Neville Chamberlain's departure before the entire House of Commons in May 1941 with Joe Lieberman's (strictly temporary) condemnation of the president, pitched to an empty chamber...
...Ted's going to spring a surprise question on the prosecutors...
...I happened to be staying in the same hotel as Monica and, as a result, the only demonstrations this lethargic pseudo-trial produced were going on under my window...
...But if Tony Blair had been accused of having sex with an intern, selling outnational security in return for campaign donations, getting the old meat'n'two veg out in front of some bird at the Sedge-field EconoLodge, renting out bedrooms at io Downing Street, shuffling the paperwork in some dodgy land deal in the East Midlands, or any other local variant of the zillions of Clinton scandals snaking out from the swamps of Arkansas to Washington to Jakarta to Peking and back, then at least some obscure backbench nonentity from Wales or Northern Ireland could stand up in the House of Commons and ask him a direct qi question...
...My colleague David Frum, from the Weekly Standard, strolled in and out of MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...Whatever else may be said of this Republic, it takes the "We, the People" business seriously...
...The very mention of Monica and, in striking contrast to Bill Clinton, Lott goes limp, flaccid, unable to perform even by the minimum standards of the U.S...
...So I climbed over it, and another guard said, "What's with you, man...
...We don't want to be 'The Jerry Springer Show,'" sniffed Maine Republican Olympia Snowe...
...In a nutshell, "impartial justice" is a wholly alien concept to the Senate...
...he's an inferioricist...
...that's a frame-up...
...the Senate, where you need 6o votes to prevent a filibuster, is mostly expert at preventing things from happening...
...In that sense, maybe it is all about sex...
...The tireless trial saboteur Tom Harkin has one fullymanned office in the Senate and no fewer than five back home in Iowa—in Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Davenport, Dubuque, and Sioux City...
...On the other other hand, maybe we don't need to imagine...
...On the other hand, the idea of Bill Clinton with Tony Blair's powers boggles the mind...
...A Democrat "bipartisan" is someone like West Virginia's Robert Byrd, the Senate's dean of dignity, solon of solemnity, and grampa of gravitas— a guy who flirts and teases and toys with voting against his party, but comes home in the end...
Vol. 32 • March 1999 • No. 3
