Feinstein Tries to Craft a Censure to End Trial

WASHINGTON —  The Senate is taking a break, rising from stiff brown chairs for a leg stretch, heading for bathrooms, raiding the gum machine. A welcome respite for a group mired in an unsavory task. A perfect opportunity for the lone figure in a forest-green suit who starts traversing the room, sidling up to a liberal here, tapping the turned shoulder of a conservative there.

For days now, Sen. Dianne Feinstein has been in powwow mode, methodically gathering support for a censure resolution that might bring the disagreeable impeachment trial of President Clinton to a graceful bipartisan close.

Proceedings resume in the Senate at 7 a.m. PST today, with House prosecutors and White House lawyers presenting summaries of their cases. Public interest is likely to focus on excerpts of Monica S. Lewinsky’s videotaped testimony.

Off the floor, Feinstein and her allies will continue to work toward agreement on a censure resolution. The California Democrat staked out that territory weeks ago, when the Senate proceeding was scarcely underway and the notion of censure seemed unripe and premature.

Still, she pressed it on television talk shows, catching her colleagues in Senate elevators and chatting them up on the phone. Her staff has toiled over 17 versions of language that would take to task a president many believe is guilty of something but not something terrible enough to warrant eviction from the White House.

Until a few days ago, few of her colleagues were in the mood to listen. Now, with the trial heading into week No. 6, the outcome virtually certain and the voting public fed up, the Senate is stuck for an ending. And Feinstein is holding a rough draft of what could be the finale, the leading Democratic player in a censure movement that gained momentum this week.

“The concept of censure fell by the wayside when the trial began, one Democratic Senate aide said. “But [Feinstein] made a public relations push and identified herself as the leader, and now anybody else who wants to get on the train would have to talk to her.”

It’s a role Feinstein has played before: artfully positioning herself as the centrist Democrat reaching across the aisle with a degree of clout out of proportion to a second-term member of the minority party.

Indeed, Feinstein is almost uniquely positioned to pull this off because Republicans respect her as an independent thinker who seldom puts party loyalty before personal conviction. For six years, she has been a frequent thorn in the president’s paw, holding out until the last minute on his 1993 economic program, withdrawing herself as a co-sponsor of his ill-fated 1994 health care plan, making the White House work for her support with compromise and capitulation.

Perhaps most important, she was one of the first Democrats last summer to express disgust at Clinton’s behavior in the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, declaring her confidence in him “shattered.”

Not even the most cynical conservative doubts that Feinstein’s revulsion was anything but sincere. In a way, it was her response that first laid the groundwork for the censure proposal that, as Feinstein envisions it, would be voted on immediately after the scheduled end of the trial late next week.

“She was early on a critic, and it was evident from her reaction [that] she felt a genuine sense of betrayal. A lot of Republicans picked up on that,” said Jack Pitney, a Republican analyst who teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont.

Allan Hoffenblum, a Los Angeles-based political consultant, said that Feinstein “is a good leader” for the censure effort because “she was one of the first to be outspoken” in chastising Clinton.

“It fits into her upbringing, and, for a California Democrat, she’s pretty conservative,” Hoffenblum said.

This may be one of those rare times when personal conviction conforms with good politics. Feinstein is intent on officially denouncing Clinton’s conduct as shameful, and leading the charge for censure can only help her as she heads for reelection in 2000 (and possible consideration for the second spot on the Democratic presidential ticket). Even if she fails in her censure bid, no one is likely to blame her for trying.

“The oxygen has been sucked out of the Senate chamber, the energy is gone and it behooves everyone to find a bipartisan way out,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at Claremont Graduate University. “The timing is perfect for censure, but the reality is she started this well before that dynamic took hold. She doesn’t look like a Democrat who is falling into line like lemmings to the sea.”

As interest in censure has grown, Feinstein is suddenly a magnet. A little clot of senators forms around her when she takes her seat on the floor. Reporters swarm her in Capitol hallways.

But brokering a deal out of such a bitterly partisan procedure will be no small feat. The political crosscurrents are fierce.

Although many Democrats favor censure--in part to inoculate themselves against charges that they winked at Clinton’s sexual misconduct--some argue that it is unnecessary. The House impeachment vote, these Democrats assert, stands as Clinton’s official rebuke.

Republican critics not only scoff at censure as a meaningless slap on the wrist but also question why their party should help provide political cover to Democrats.

And some senators simply question its constitutionality.

Feinstein is tiptoeing through this thicket with a calculated strategy: She does not talk specifics. She has trumpeted the merits of her resolution on every major network and in every newspaper, and has never once revealed what it actually says. The media are clamoring for a copy. The White House is in the dark. And it was days before Feinstein would even name the resolution’s only Republican co-sponsor, Sen. Robert F. Bennett of Utah.

“What does it say?” one reporter asked Feinstein in a recent hallway crush.

“I’m not going to say.”

“I am hearing language like . . . well, maybe you could characterize it for me?” another reporter tried.

“I’m not going to characterize it.”

Finally, she ended the inquisition, sounding exasperated: “The minute you do, it gets all torn apart. It is important to me that we have an opportunity to talk to people on the other side.”

Few would disagree with her game plan. And if any Democrat can pull it off, observers from both parties say, it would be Feinstein, who stunned Congress in her first term when she convinced Republicans to support an assault weapon ban that the National Rifle Assn. strongly opposed. The odds of its passage had been considered nil.

Censure remains an uphill battle but, if she succeeds, Feinstein could count herself among the few lawmakers in this saga who set out to accomplish something and did.

“I don’t think anybody’s going to come out of this controversy with a mantle of greatness,” Pitney said. “But she could claim the mantle of competence, and that’s something.”

Times staff writer Marc Lacey contributed to this story.