"We Fight Like Cats & Dogs"

If this was bipartisanship," Barney Frank sputtered after Democrats lost yet another vote in the House Judiciary Committee, "the Taliban wins a medal for religious tolerance." But as long as awards are being handed out, Frank should get an Emmy for standing in front of the TV cameras and managing to look so surprised. It didn't take last week's string of straight-party votes--on everything from which evidence to release to the ground rules for impeachment--to prove what most of Capitol Hill already knows. Clinton's fate lies in the hands of one of the most doggedly partisan committees in all of Congress.

The 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.

What's with these guys? In recent years the House Judiciary Committee has become an ideological rodeo. Its everyday agenda is heavy on such hot-button issues as late-term abortion, school prayer, gun control and affirmative action. The subject matter has done a good job of attracting true believers from both sides. "We're terribly polarized," says a staff member with a tinge of pride. "We fight like cats and dogs." Prominent Republicans with a cause include Charles Canady, father of the English-as-the-official-language bill, and Barr, an anti-gun control crusader with close ties to the National Rifle Association. On the left are some of Congress's strongest civil rights partisans, including Waters and Texan Sheila Jackson Lee. The committee has had some low-key bipartisan successes in areas such as court reform and defining intellectual-property rights in the cyber age, but they haven't got as much attention as the politically dangerous wedge issues that make up the committee's steady diet.

Most moderate members of Congress would prefer a long stint on the surface transportation subcommittee. The Judiciary Committee's incendiary issues make its members inviting targets for special-interest attack ads, which can be treacherous for members from competitive districts. And since the committee doesn't even confirm federal judges, as its Senate counterpart does, it's almost entirely patronage free. At least on surface transportation, a member could get a new bus line for his home district.

The upshot is that the committee is a Sharks-and-Jets mix. Until the recent addition of Mary Bono, the Republicans were all white, all Christian and all male. More than half are from the South, and only one is from the Northeast. The 16 Democrats include five blacks, five Jews, three women and one openly gay man. As a group they voted with the liberal Americans for Democratic Action more than 90% of the time.