Legislators United States

For Andrea Kessler, the mental picture of impeachment hearings in the Capitol and bombs falling in Iraq was as hard to sort out as the scene before her: a giant Picasso sculpture looming over miniature Alpine lodges where vendors from Bavaria sold socks to American holiday shoppers. "I just can't believe it," the 23-year-old Chicagoan said with a shake of her head. "Because it's so unbelievable."

A deeply divided House of Representatives votes this morning on the impeachment of President Clinton after a 13-hour debate Friday that swung from solemnity to street fight and laid the groundwork for a likely Senate trial.

With the outcome hardly in doubt, about the only suspense during Friday's impeachment debate was whether the outnumbered House Democrats would walk out. Another possible protest scenario had all 206 Democrats circling the Capitol, hands linked. A third proposal had all the Democrats standing mute in the House chamber and simply letting Republicans do all the talking. "But too many people wanted to be heard," rued one House Democrat. In the end, they played by the rules.

True or false? Every factual claim made in the course of the impeachment debate is subject to factual review by members of the House Judiciary Committee. But that did not put a stop to the litany of charges and countercharges of questionable accuracy in Friday's debate. Some of the most contentious claims: Question. Is censure constitutional or not? Answer.

"The question of the day is which capital city sustained more damage Friday: Baghdad or Washington?" At least that was what Marshall Wittmann, the head of congressional relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation, wanted to know--not to diminish the human damage in Iraq but to emphasize the political savagery ravaging the American capital. "The rest of the country looks in disgust upon us," he said, nodding at one of five television sets tuned to impeachment at the influential think tank.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) called Friday for an end to prying into the sex lives of politicians. Hyde, who chairs the committee that called for President Clinton's impeachment on allegations he lied to conceal a sexual affair, said the American public was not well served by exposing the private "sexual misadventures" of lawmakers. He commented a day after House Speaker-elect Bob Livingston (R-La.) admitted to extramarital affairs.

With the House poised to impeach President Clinton and send the case to a trial in the Senate, renewed interest is sure to focus on a Republican senator from Kansas who changed history's course 130 years ago by breaking party ranks and casting the vote that saved President Andrew Johnson from conviction. Historians to this day debate why Edmund G. Ross cast his vote the way he did in the nation's only presidential impeachment trial. But no one disputes what happened to Ross afterward.

Outgoing Republican lawmaker Jay C. Kim, who closed his congressional offices a month before his term ends, resurfaced Wednesday to deny reports he abandoned his constituents and to add his voice to the impeachment debate roiling Washington. Kim made the remarks in an interview published Wednesday by the Ontario-based Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. It was the congressman's first public statement since the news last week that he had closed his offices in Yorba Linda, Ontario and Washington.

They were just getting to the part about House ethics in the new members' orientation one Friday last month when the South Bay's new Republican congressman, Steve Kuykendall, had to duck out to attend to a matter of great urgency. He had to look at an apartment. It was a 1950s-bland studio in a building called Hill House, where about half the tenants are members of Congress and the manager is a guy named Buzz. It was $750 a month and Kuykendall took it on the spot.