From the New York Times:
nytimes.com
December 12, 1998
Panel, on Party Lines, Votes Impeachment; Clinton Voices Remorse, Invites Censure
By ALISON MITCHELL
WASHINGTON -- After a passionate debate that was by turns solemn with history, fiercely partisan and even sometimes sorrowful, the House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines Friday to impeach President Clinton and remove him from office for perjury and obstruction of justice.
About 4:20 P.M, the Republican-controlled committee, voting 21 to 16, charged Clinton in one article of impeachment with providing "perjurious, false and misleading testimony" last Aug. 17 before a grand jury investigating the Monica Lewinsky matter.
A few hours later, one Republican -- Representative Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina -- broke with his party as the committee voted, 20 to 17, to approve a second article of impeachment on perjury, this time for Clinton's depositon in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. Graham had long said he would not support impeachment for a lie in a civil case.
And then at 9:15 P.M., the committee again voted 21 to 16, this time to approve the third article accusing the President of obstruction of justice. The article accuses Clinton of trying to influence witnesses in the Lewinsky matter, including his personal secretary and the White House intern. The committee adjourned for the evening, planning to resume debate on the fourth article of impeachment, on abuse of power, on Saturday morning.
So what began with a civil sex harassment suit by an obscure Arkansas civil servant and was transformed into a criminal investigation of sex and mendacity by the president, left Clinton Friday as the third president to confront impeachment, with a House vote scheduled for next week.
Andrew Johnson was spared removal from office by one vote in the Senate after the House impeached him in 1868. Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in the Watergate scandal 24 years ago after the Judiciary Committee approved three articles against him, but before the House voted.
On Friday Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, the chairman, brought the Judiciary Committee's ten-week inquiry towards a close, insisting on the gravity of the case.
"When the president performs the public act of asking God to witness his promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, that is not trivial," the Illinois Republican said. "Whether it's a civil suit or before the grand jury the significance of the oath cannot or must not be cheapened if our proud boast that we are a government of laws and not of men is to mean anything."
Clinton himself commented for the first time since the committee began televised proceedings. Just minutes before the committee was to take its first vote, the president walked into the Rose Garden and spoke once again of his remorse for his affair with Ms. Lewinsky. For the first time he publicly said he would accept a rebuke or censure.
"Mere words cannot fully express the profound remorse I feel for what our country is going through and for what members of both parties in Congress are now forced to deal with," he said.
"These past months have been a torturous process of coming to terms with what I did," he said. "I understand that accountability demands consequences and I'm prepared to accept them. Painful though the condemnation of the Congress would be, it would pale in comparison to the consequences of the pain I have caused my family. There is no greater agony."
But Clinton stopped well short of the admission that some undecided Republicans were looking for that he had in fact lied under oath.
At the Judiciary Committee, most members left the debate to watch the president on television. Then, minutes later, in the same cavernous hearing room where Nixon's fate was weighed 24 years ago, they voted to approve the first article of impeachment and moved on to the second.
The committee is to vote by Saturday on articles of impeachment accusing the president of obstruction of justice and abuse of power.
House Democrats argued that Clinton had deceived the nation, but said he did not deserve removal from office for lies about an extra-marital affair.
"Wake up America" implored Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida, calling for the nation, which polls show overwhelmingly opposes impeachment, to make its feelings known. "They are about to impeach our president. They are about to reverse two national elections. They are about to discard your votes."
The president's chances of avoiding trial in the Senate -- where his opponents are exceedingly unlikely to get the 67 votes needed for conviction -- rest with a few dozen Republican moderates. The vote in the House, which is to return on Thursday, is considered too close to call.
Because the stakes are so high, both parties in the House were prepared to take extraordinary steps to bring back members, including carrying one California congressman recuperating from surgery to Washington on an air ambulance if necessary.
In a sign that Clinton is not making headway, six previously undeclared Republicans -- Jack Metcalf of Washington, Saxby Chamblis of Georgia, Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, Bob Franks of New Jersey and Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey -- came out in favor of impeachment or said they were leaning that way.
"What was needed from the president today was an admission, not contrition," Franks said after Clinton's statement.
And a moderate Republican who has said he opposes impeachment, Rep. Amo Houghton of New York, became the target of a conservative Republican who said he would run against Houghton in 2000. Jim Pierce said Houghton had "betrayed" conservatives.
"The trend has not been in the direction of those who want to avoid impeachment," said Rep. Charles E. Schumer, New York's new senator-elect. "Over the weekend Americans are going to realize this is for real."
There was also a signal from the Senate Friday that it was suddenly taking seriously the possibility that it could become the jury in a trial of the president. The press secretaries of Trent Lott, the majority leader from Mississippi, and Tom Daschle, the minority leader from South Dakota, did something they rarely do -- put out a joint statement. All it said was that the two men would make no comment until after the House acted.
It was almost a year ago that the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, began investigating the president's relationship with Ms. Lewinsky and whether he was trying to persuade her to commit perjury in the Paula Jones case. The investigation plunged the White House into a yearlong crisis that Clinton compounded when he emphatically told the nation that he had not had sex "with that woman," Ms. Lewinsky.
Seven months later Starr reported to Congress that he had "substantial and credible evidence" that Clinton had committed 11 possibly impeachable offenses in his effort to cover-up the affair.
At the time Hyde said "we all agree any impeachment cannot succeed unless it is done in a bipartisan way." But on Friday he defended his inquiry.
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