IMPEACHMENT EVE

8:45 A.M. Here we are in the Speaker’s Lobby, directly off the House floor, 15 minutes before debate begins on the most historic vote any of us is ever likely to witness, and a large group of reporters stands riveted, entranced, dumbfounded, every ounce of attention concentrated on the spectacle taking place in front of us. Right before our eyes, Maria Shriver and Mary Bono are hugging. It is a long, lingering hug. Then they push apart and giggle, like Marcia Brady and her sister Jan sharing some innocent intimacy. Both are wearing black pants suits, and they seem oblivious to the semicircle of gaping male reporters who stand a few feet away. A consensus is forming among my colleagues: This could be an exciting day.

9:00 A.M. But it will be a long one. The impeachment vote won’t take place until tomorrow, but the House has agreed to convene for 16 hours of debate today — “debate” being the term of art the House applies to a series of speeches given by speakers who pay no attention to one another. Paying attention would extend the session to 4 A.M. at a minimum, and everyone already looks tired.

The session opens with an admonition from the presiding speaker, Ray LaHood of Illinois. “The Chair asks and expects the cooperation of all members in maintaining a level of decorum that properly dignifies the proceedings of the House.” His plea for civility is greeted as you’d expect: with an eruption of hooting and catcalls.

In the Speaker’s Lobby, Mary Bono has finished her tete-a-tete with Maria Shriver, and now she’s swarmed by reporters, who pepper her with Mary Bono-like questions. She mentions how drained she was after the Judiciary Committee voted out the impeachment articles. “Where’s you go to dinner that night?” asks one reporter. “How did you feel when you woke up the next morning, after the vote?” asks another. “How do you feel now?” “Are you feeling sad this morning?”

She fields the questions gracefully — she is “absolutely sad,” in case you were wondering — and makes only one curious comment. “I think when this is all over,” she says, “we’ll look back and both sides will really see that this has really brought us closer together.” Mrs. Bono is new to the House.

10:45 A.M. The first two speeches of the debate — by Richard Gephardt and Henry Hyde — are excellent. Hyde’s in particular, with its references to Bunker Hill, Concord and Lexington, and the graves at Arlington, sounds like a Decoration Day speech from several generations ago. (Nobody talks about Concord and Lexington anymore. And what’s a Bunker Hill?) But it is fast becoming apparent, as the speakers line up for their allotted three-minute turns, that nobody has anything new to say. The press gallery, which just an hour ago was standing-room-only, is now half-empty. In the work area off the gallery, no one pays attention to the TVs tuned to C-SPAN.

It is remarkable how quickly even the loveliest phrases, like “rule of law,” become cliches in the wind tunnel of political debate. But it’s also remarkable how, for all their difference in emphasis, the speeches of both Democrats and Republicans share certain premises. Everyone hangs his rhetoric on the same logical frame. This consists of five points, articulated in one way or another by each member, regardless of party: (1) I think the president is a lying sleazebag. (2) The House must do itself proud. (3) I’m voting my conscience and you aren’t. (4) O the poor children! And ergo: (5) The sleazebag should (should not) be impeached. Q.E.D.

This is not what you’d expect history-in-the-making to sound like, and as the debate drags on, 4 A.M. is looking farther and farther away. Spirits are suddenly buoyed when word filters through the House that the leadership has agreed to end the session at 10 P.M. Even the debaters have realized their debate stinks.

12:20 P.M. Out in the Speaker’s Lobby, I’m talking to Jerry Nadler, the rotund congressman from New York City, when Bob Barr, Republican of Georgia, appears. Barr is immediately besieged by reporters. He is second only to Mary Bono as a favorite Republican among the press corps, most of whom see in them the twin poles of today’s Republican party — airheads on one end, nutcases on the other. Barr recently admitted he once spoke to a white-supremacist group, and this morning, in his speech on the floor, he quoted John F. Kennedy with effusive praise, perhaps trying to reposition himself as a moderate. The smart money says it won’t work.

Anyway, as Barr chats to reporters, Patrick Kennedy, the boyish congressman from Rhode Island, suddenly appears. His face is crimson. He moves as close to Barr as he can through the scrum of reporters and begins shouting. “You’re disgraceful!” he bellows. “Anybody who went to a racist organization has no business invoking my uncle’s memory. Racist! I’m outraged!”

“Young man,” says Barr, “you can say whatever you’d like.”

“Young man?” Kennedy screams. “Young man? I’m a duly elected member of my state!” Veins are popping from his neck.

“And I’m duly impressed,” Barr says.

With that, Kennedy turns on his heel and zips out of the room as fast as his little legs will carry him, looking as incensed as he might have been when Dad refused to buy him Bermuda for his thirteenth birthday.

Poor Nadler is suddenly forgotten in all the commotion. He slips up behind me. “What happened?”

“Pat called Bob a racist.”

“Oh,” Nadler shrugs. “Gee, if I call Bob Barr a racist can I get all that attention too?”

2:15 P.M. Can it get any drearier than this? These must be the doldrums. A representative from the Virgin Islands is on the floor declaring that the Republicans are pursuing impeachment because what they really want to do is impeach “a very, very popular first lady.” It’s an interesting speech, in that it raises a question that’s gone unaddressed for too long: Whose bright idea was it to let the Virgin Islands have a representative?

Up in the press gallery, the Kennedy-Barr imbroglio has taken on the dimensions of a clash of the titans. This is how dreary it can get. Reporters are comparing accounts of the mythic battle and phoning in bulletins to their newspapers. When word breaks that Barr is in the Speaker’s Lobby, we all rush down.

He’s sitting at a table, surrounded by reporters.

“Congressman, was there actual personal interaction between the two of you?”

“Is it true you called him ‘young man’?”

“Was that an attempt to intimidate him — to denigrate him, in some way, by referring to him as a ‘young man’?”

And then the Mary Bono question: “How do you feel?”

3:00 P.M. Barney Frank was the subject of an excruciating profile by Sally Quinn in the Style section of this morning’s Washington Post. She praised his quick wit and eloquence, so when he walks to the podium — without a prepared text! — we’re prepared for . . . well, a quick-witted and eloquent attack on the Republicans.

“They plan,” he says, in his rapid-fire style, “having degraded impeachment and claimed it is no definitive judgment, once they get a partisan vote for an impeachment where the bar has been lowered, then to say that’s the basis for resignation.”

He gets an ovation when he’s through, but even among his colleagues the faces betray what they’re thinking, which is: Huh?

4:30 P.M. Finally there’s something to replace the electrifying Barr-Kennedy exchange as a subject of conversation. A rumor circulates that Larry Flynt, the publisher of the one-hand magazine Hustler, is holding a press conference in Los Angeles to reveal the names of 10 more Republican congressmen who’ve had extra-marital affairs. The rumor has two main benefits. First, everyone gets to speculate about who these adulterous malefactors might be. And second, it gives the people in the press gallery an excuse to change the TV channel from C-SPAN to some other station that might carry Flynt’s press conference live. That means we get to watch Susan Molinari on MSNBC while we wait. I’m not sure this is an improvement.

On the floor, Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont, is pointing out that there’s gap between the rich and poor in this country and it’s getting wider. Plus 43 million people don’t have health insurance. In response, the Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner points out that today the Nasdaq reached a new high. Who says the impeachment process can’t be illuminating?

6:15 P.M. The appointed hour for Larry Flynt’s press conference has come and gone without a word from Larry. A false alarm, apparently. Now the press-gallery TV is tuned to Redskins Report, the reporters having abandoned all pretense of an interest in public-affairs television. I make one last pass through the Speaker’s Lobby, which is empty except for the cops and a couple of reporters. On the floor, fewer than 20 members are milling about.

A few minutes later, I head back to the press gallery to get my coat before I leave. If history is being made today, it’s being made without witnesses. The TV is tuned to figure skating.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.