The Impeachment Non-Debate

Enough, already. After spending the morning locked in fierce debate over how long they would debate, a compromise was reached and members suddenly found reasons to be somewhere -- anywhere -- other than the House floor as the impeachment of Bill Clinton was actually deliberated. Anybody who could leave did, and those that were left behind gave pro forma speeches to a largely indifferent room. With a Republican victory a foregone conclusion, everyone was just running out the clock, making their speeches not to the floor but to their constituents before trudging in Saturday for the vote that will almost certainly impeach a president of the United States for only the second time in history.

Even though impeachment is now all but assured, the Clinton option -- kicking and screaming all the way -- was for Democrats the order of the day. And after Richard Gephardt's tent-revival performance on the Capitol steps Thursday ("That is wrong! That is wrong!"), wringing every last hour out of Friday's predestined debate played as the final unseemly act in an extraordinarily unseemly Beltway year. "All they'll be doing is delaying the inevitable," says TIME congressional correspondent John Dickerson, "and after protesting a wartime impeachment debate, it would be a big risk if they were seen as dragging it out." Of course, hardly anyone this whole year has been accused of doing the smart thing.