Where I Stand -- Brian Greenspun: Small minds, big mistake

DEJA VU all over again, again.

It wasn't that long ago that the Republican-controlled Congress threw its ideological monkey wrenches into the machinery of government and shut the behemoth down. You remember that, don't you? Paid vacations for everyone on the federal payroll while the ideologues in the House and Senate played chicken with President Clinton.

Do you remember what happened or, in the vernacular of today's gotcha politics, who won? The GOP took it on the chin and the people rewarded Clinton with a second term.

Next question: Do you remember late last year when the kindergarten class we call the House of Representatives ignored the people of these United States and pushed Monica Lewinsky in the voters' faces throughout the election cycle that ended in November? That's right. The GOP took another shot to the chin and lost congressional seats it was supposed to win and stagnated in the Senate when every pundit worth his pay was betting on some moderate gains for the Republicans.

Then to make matters worse, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was delivered a knockout blow by his colleagues and resigned as speaker and as a representative. As if that weren't enough, within a very short time, his heir apparent delivered a TKO to himself when Rep. Bob Livingston announced he was not perfect and that he would not run and would not accept what, at that time, was a done speakership deal.

Life was getting real interesting for the Republican Party while it blindly followed a very vocal and powerful faction which has set up camp within the GOP's "big tent" in an effort to show the unenlightened the "way." Then the improbable happened when the "I" word gathered enough steam to roll through the Judiciary Committee and, ultimately, the entire House before most people -- in and out of Washington -- knew what was happening.

The people rebelled when they awoke to see what had been done to their president and responded to the pollsters in record numbers that they liked the job Clinton was doing. Talk about a bad case of frustration. Those who hunted for Clinton's scalp could barely talk in the face of the out-of-sight poll numbers. Frankly, the silence was far preferable to the blathering that ensued from some. Especially from GOP moral compass Bill Bennett, who remains to this day suitably outraged that the people of the United States don't share his own sense of outrage about what has happened.

Today they did it again. At least at press time it was a safe bet that for only the second time in the history of this great republic, the U.S. Senate was going into trial mode on the question of the impeachment of the president of the United States of America. Those are big words and they mean big business. It is too bad they are being acted upon by such small people.

I don't know what will happen --I daresay no one in the Senate has much of a clue, either -- but I do know that once something like this gets started without sufficient leadership to keep it on a sane and responsible track, anything can happen. We could, after all, wake up in a week, a month or a year and find that the twice-elected president of this country has been thrown out of office, an office that an overwhelming majority of Americans want him to keep.

Or we could learn that saner heads -- as opposed to the out-of-control, five-year-old mentalities that ruled the House -- prevailed and this impeachment thing was given the short shrift that any partisan effort to remove a president should deserve. Mind you, I am not for short-shrifting. I believe that the people of this country are owed an embarrassing, ugly, partisan and downright disgusting trial with all the X-rated words Monica and Linda can conjure up before the senators are called to cast a vote. After all, we allowed our representatives to get us this far, didn't we?

And while I would hope the Senate would vote for sanity rather than conviction, I know the possibility exists that we could be listening to President Al Gore give next year's State of the Union address. (Not necessarily a bad thing, just a premature one).

So we now embark on another GOP-led effort to confront Clinton in an effort to win the "gotcha" game. And while the President is complicitous beyond reason in this affair, the Republicans are swimming upstream just like they did when they shut the government down and when they shoved down our throats the ugliness of the Lewinsky matter when we told them, "hold, enough!" Why can't they learn to leave well enough alone and do the good things the people apparently expected them to do when they were given the reins of leadership? That, by the way, is the same question that was asked of Democrats a couple of decades ago when they squandered their leadership opportunities. Perhaps there is something in the water inside the Beltway.

Whatever the reason and whatever the outcome, the fact remains that my Republican friends have probably shot themselves in far more than their feet this time. Whether Clinton is convicted and removed from office or whether he is acquitted with all the appropriate and very much deserved finger-pointing, the people will remember this sad chapter and the wringer they were forced through, courtesy of the Grand Old Party.

I know the GOP is expecting the voters to return to form and forget just like they almost always do. But this is one of those times where it just won't happen. This is similar to that time in Nevada when the legislators voted themselves a 300 percent increase in their pensions against the advice and wishes of the electorate. "They'll forget by next election just like they always do," was the rallying cry to the public treasury raiders. Well, the politicians were wrong and the people remembered. Whoops!

There's another "whoops" coming. It will be a part of the Y2K thing. For now, though, sit back and relax and try not to get sick to your stomach. No, not from listening to the Tripp tapes. We've already been there and done that. I mean the sickness we'll feel watching grown men and women squirm in their chairs because they didn't have the courage to lead the country away from this international humiliation.

Whither thou goest, U.S. Senate? Nobody knows, and isn't that the great shame of it all.

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