WASHINGTON -- The House Judiciary Committee, dominated by Republicans determined to punish President Clinton, is racing toward a likely recommendation to remove the president from office, as the nation's third presidential impeachment inquiry enters its final climactic stages.
Clinton's lawyers demanded three or four days to call panels of expert witnesses -- but not any of the key players in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., said in a statement Saturday that he's considering whether to slightly alter the schedule to accommodate the White House, but he still insisted on an impeachment vote by Saturday.Three witnesses on the White House list, for a proposed panel on the standards of impeachment, are Johnson administration Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach; Bruce Ackerman, professor of constitutional law at Yale University, and Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton. The committee already has heard from 30 witnesses on impeachment standards and perjury, and Hyde said he didn't want witnesses who would "duplicate testimony . . . already received."
If witnesses testify, the Clinton lawyers would follow with their conclusions in the same room where three impeachment articles were approved against Richard M. Nixon in July 1974.
Right after the Clinton team will come summations by two veteran lawyer-investigators, certain to clash over perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power evidence submitted by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.
David Schippers, a one-time prosecutor who made his reputation fighting organized crime in Chicago, is speaking for the Republican majority. Abbe Lowell, an ex-prosecutor who specializes in government ethics, represents the Democrats.
Committee Republicans, who have shunned polls and calls for censure, want a vote on impeachment articles Friday or Saturday. They are virtually certain to recommend that Clinton's efforts to conceal his sexual affair in the White House with Lewinsky, a former intern half his age, is misconduct serious enough for removal from office.
Nobody knows the outcome of an impeachment vote in the full House, but a liberal Judiciary Committee member, Rep. Charles Schumer of New York, said, "I am afraid it's a neck-and-neck vote. The simple arithmetic is this will be decided by one or two votes, and that's frightening to me."