The Big Push To Impeach

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If the House of Representatives votes to impeach Bill Clinton in the next few weeks, the man responsible will be someone whose face most Americans won't recognize and whose name they may never have heard. It won't be Ken Starr, the independent counsel who brought the Monica Lewinsky affair to the House of Representatives. Or Henry Hyde, the silver-haired chairman of the House committee where articles of impeachment originate. Or even Bob Livingston, who will soon replace Newt Gingrich as Speaker. Instead the author of Bill Clinton's most historic defeat, if it happens, will be Tom DeLay, a flinty former pest exterminator from Sugar Land, Texas, with a tense smile and a talent for making offers his fellow Republican lawmakers can't refuse.

For much of November, Republicans were looking everywhere for an impeachment escape hatch. The midterm elections had gone badly, and everyone blamed it on the party's obsession with ousting the President. Shut it down, said party elders; take Henry Hyde's gavel away and move on. In the House, G.O.P. members began discussing milder presidential punishments as if they were debating different models of a new car. Formulations like "censure," "censure plus," and "censure with teeth" came in and out of fashion. With Gingrich out, Hyde's committee in obvious disarray and Livingston showing no stomach for dealing with the impeachment mess, the troops had no leader to guide them. But before the agitated Republicans could flee the House in a stampede, DeLay, the third-ranking Republican and the man whose job it is to round up votes, started nailing the exits shut. The Constitution allows one option, he said: impeachment, up or down. Censure "means nothing." And voting to impeach Clinton for lying under oath, he insisted, is not a dangerous act because the Senate will never follow through and remove him from office.

Members listened. They had to. DeLay is not only the G.O.P.'s top vote counter but also the only sitting leader to emerge untouched by the election debacle and the Gingrich resignation it produced. In fact, he emerged with more power than ever, power he has amassed the old-fashioned way: by doling out favors and exacting revenge when crossed. Last week some Republicans who had been wavering on what to do about the President began stiffening their positions in favor of impeachment after conversations with DeLay or one of his lieutenants. And Livingston too, under pressure from DeLay, began sending signals that he was not inclined to let a censure alternative come to the House floor. DeLay predicted to TIME last week that if, as expected, the Judiciary Committee sends an impeachment resolution to the full House, the Speaker-elect will vote yes. "Knowing Bob Livingston," DeLay told TIME, "he will take the recommendation of the committee."

Suddenly, despite overwhelming public opposition, the chance that Bill Clinton will be impeached is rising. The President didn't help his case with the dismissive tone that ran through the answers he gave to 81 written questions submitted by committee Republicans. But it is true too that DeLay "has sharpened the issue," says Peter King of New York, the leading Republican proponent of censure. "Impeachment looked dead, but he is pushing it hard, and that guarantees a close vote."