NY Times profile of leading anti-impeachment Republican. Quite a character,& unclassifiable ideologically. For your reading pleasure (in case you have not seen the article in the Sunday Times):
An Immoderate Voice for Moderation on the
Impeachment Question
By JAMES BRUNI
WASHINGTON -- Representative Peter T. King is not unique among members of Congress for having supported the Irish Republican Army. But, as far as anyone can tell, he remains the only Congressman to have called himself "the Ollie North of Ireland."
King is also not alone among Republicans in having publicly criticized Newt Gingrich, the House Speaker who is resigning. But it seems fairly certain that he was the first to describe Gingrich as "road kill on the highway of American politics."
In other words, King is not prone to moderation, at least not in the verbal thrust and parry of politics, which he fondly calls "a contact sport." And he is at it again, loudly cajoling his fellow
Republicans, in his immoderate fashion, to dispose of President Clinton's impeachment crisis in, of all things, a moderate way.
King has emerged as the leading Republican voice in Congress for punishing Clinton through some means short of impeachment. He has become a familiar face on television arguing against his Republican leaders, has been discussing strategy daily with White House aides and has joined House Democrats in circulating a proposal for censure.
It has been a lonely effort.
Although he contends that as many as 20 Republicans are prepared to vote against impeachment this week, he remains 1 of only 5 to have taken that position publicly. And he is the most outspoken Republican in advocating censure, a penalty many other Republicans say
they favor but are certain their conservative leadership will block.
"No one knows how this is going to play out," he said in an interview in his Capitol Hill officelast week. "I may be looked upon in a few months as the only genius in the Republican Party, or the guy who never got it right. But I do think this is going to be much more traumatic than people realize right now. Because the country does not realize we are going through with impeachment."
With the House moving inexorably toward that end, King has framed his appeal in the starkest terms, telling his party mates that they are driving themselves toward minority status by defying what he sees as the public's deep animosity toward impeachment.
But beyond that, this product of the most vaunted Republican political machine in the country, the Nassau County Republican Committee, says he is fueled by a profound distaste for the "reform politics" that he contends have criminalized the American system with complex campaign finance rules and independent counsel statutes.
"When we elect a Republican President, I just imagine some left-wing group or some liberal Democratic foundation sponsoring a lawsuit against the next President," he said. "I just envision payback time for the Democrats."
The son of a New York City police detective, King talks in the fast-paced mumble of a wisecracking officer on the beat. He does not hesitate to take pokes at rivals, but also peppers his conversation with self-deprecating jokes. Clearly, he has yet to inspire fear among members of his staff, who broke into guffaws recently when his train of thought ran off track, causing King to say glumly, "There was something brilliant I was going to say, if I could only remember it."
After all of King's efforts against impeachment, many reporters have taken to calling him a moderate, a label he despises. He is proud to have received a 100 percent rating from the Christian Coalition and is unabashed about opposing abortion, affirmative action, bilingual education, gun control, the National Endowment for the Arts and anything that smells like a "good government" proposal.
"Barry Goldwater said, 'Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,' and that's where I am," he said.
The grandson of Irish immigrants, Peter Thomas King was born April 5, 1944, in the Sunnyside section of Queens, two doors down from the Celtic Cafe. He graduated from Brooklyn Prep and helped put himself through St. Francis College in Brooklyn by unloading trains in
Manhattan's West Side rail yards.
"There were a lot of old-time Democrats, conservative in their views, who moved from places like Sunnyside to Nassau County," said Representative Thomas Manton, a Queens Democrat who is close to King. "They ended up becoming Republicans there, but they still have a lot of old-time Democratic values. Peter is in that group."
While earning a law degree from Notre Dame in the mid-1960's -- he follows the football team with rapt attention -- King worked two summers for Richard M. Nixon's Manhattan law firm, alongside another law student named Rudolph W. Giuliani. (The two men areboth considering running for the Senate in 2000 and are not particularly friendly.) King remains a fan of Nixon, keeping several photographs of the former President on his office wall.
"He never got the full credit that he was entitled to," King said of Nixon, the last President to face impeachment hearings.
In college, King wrote a paper defending Mayor James J. Walker of New York City, who was forced to resign in 1932 amid corruption charges. After law school, King worked briefly for the
lawyer Roy Cohn before getting a legal job with what Democrats consider a modern-day Tammany Hall: Nassau County government. He later served on the Hempstead Town Council and as Nassau County Comptroller.
He remains a staunch defender of political machines, contending that they help middle-class people attain office. Without them, he says, "only rich people and wackos" will go into the business.
Though he grew up hearing stories about Irish heroes, it was not until the late 60's that King became active in Irish politics. He organized protests outside the Nassau Coliseum when a British marching band performed there, helped raise money for I.R.A. hunger strikers and became something of a spokesman for the cause.
Along the way, he was accused of supporting terrorism, including helping to finance I.R.A. arms purchases. King denies that, despite his joking reference to himself as Oliver North.
On his office wall, King has a photograph of a 1994 Washington reception for the prime ministers of Ireland and Britain in which House Speaker Thomas S. Foley, who had leveled the terrorism charge, is stepping off the reception line rather than shake King's hand.
After he was first elected to Congress, King was a strong supporter of Gingrich. But soon after the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, King said he began to feel that the party had
become anti-Northeastern in its outlook and oratory.
A strong labor supporter, he also worried that Republican officials were needlessly antagonizing blue-collar workers and their unions -- something he says Ronald Reagan would never have done. (During the interview last week, James P. Hoffa, the newly elected president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, called King to say hello.)
In 1996, King accused the Republican leadership in Congress of appealing to "barefoot hillbillies." He says today: "These were guys who were making us a regional party. If I were in a national leadership position, I wouldn't be saying things to offend people in Mississippi or Alabama."
Then in 1997, King accused Gingrich of abandoning Republican principles on issues like tax cuts and affirmative action, writing an article in The Weekly Standard calling Gingrich "road kill." The Speaker was furious with King until later that year, when King refused to join an attempted coup against Gingrich. But it took Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, King's fellow Long Island Republican, to reconcile the two.
As King tells it, he and D'Amato were in a Washington bar when Gingrich strolled in. D'Amato waved the Speaker over and said: "You don't have to worry about King. He'll shoot you in the front."
Some Democrats say King has become a strong defender of the President because Clinton is popular in New York and King is positioning himself to run for the Senate in 2000. But King says his defense of Clinton will probably only hurt him in a Republican primary.
He also worries that his outspokenness on impeachment could cause friction between him and House Republicans, including some in leadership. But in his bluffly affable way, King brushes such concerns aside.
"There's a small majority, so the Republicans will have to deal with the cards they're dealt, and I'm one of the cards," he said, referring to the Republicans' slim six-vote majority in the House
next year. "Hope it's not the joker."
nytimes.com
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