To the egress

Now that the Senate has demonstrated it does not have the votes to remove President Clinton from office and has limited testimony to the taped depositions of three who already have been thoroughly interrogated, the most esteemed legislative body in the nation — nay, the world — can get down to the real business of crafting an exit strategy. Or, in plain English, finding a way out.

The likely scenario is that the Republican and Democratic leadership will use the three-day deposition break to cut a deal that will conclude this sorry episode by mid-February. A vote that will fail to oust the president will be accompanied by a censure resolution reprimanding him for his reckless, stupid, dishonest behavior.

In other words, in roughly three weeks, the U.S. Senate will be where the American public was six months ago.

The destination may be inevitable but the route is filled with peril. Or at least irrelevant detours. One such pointless sidetrip is, unfortunately, being led by Maine’s senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.

They belong to a group of seven that is exploring how the Senate can find the president guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice without voting to remove him from office. It’s a bad idea, a idea of dubious constitutionality, that should be sent back to to the law-school journal from whence it came.

The constitution is clear — the Senate’s job here is to decide, by a two-thirds vote, whether the president is unfit to hold office. There is no range of penalties prescribed, no two weeks’ suspension without pay, no schedule of fines or authority to impose community service. Just in or out, period.

The “finding of fact” proposal concocted by University of Chicago law professor Joseph Isenbergh takes the simple declarative sentence that describes the Senate’s straightforward role in impeachment — guilt equals removal — and parses it into two unrelated clauses. One would have thought that a a club so well-stocked with lawyers as the Senate would know that a primary function of law journals is to provide a forum for scholarly arguments conducted for argument’s sake.

Backers of the Isenbergh suggestion say the finding-of-fact vote would be stronger medicine because, unlike censure, it could not be revoked by a future Congress. That, in the parlance of the legal world, is a distinction without a difference. What, in the end, does the Senate or the nation gain from a squabble over censure vs. finding of fact? And what are the chances that any members of a future Congress would go on the record as supporting adultery and lying?

Besides, the president is the only person in the country exposed to double jeopardy — trial before the Senate while in office and before a criminal court afterwards. It’s always been a long shot that Mr. Clinton would ever be convicted of criminal charges for what he’s done. The odds of doing hard time get considerable longer if he’s already been convicted in the Senate but left unpunished.

It’s difficult to remember a time when the American public was not saying it deplored Mr. Clinton’s behavior but did not believe it warranted overturning the result of a national election. The way out has been clearly marked for months; unless it wanders down more dimly lit dead-ends, the U.S. Senate may be just weeks away from finding it.