Hearings Won’t Go Public Senate Leaves Decision On Packwood To Ethics Panel

After a highly partisan and contentious debate, an uneasy Senate Wednesday night narrowly rejected a Democratic move to force public hearings on allegations of sexual and official misconduct by Senate Finance committee Chairman Bob Packwood, R-Ore.

By a vote of 48 to 52, the Senate defeated a proposal by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., that would have changed Senate rules to require public hearings in the final stages of all major ethics cases, including the 2-1/2-year Packwood inquiry.

Then it voted, 62 to 38, for a proposal by ethics committee Chairman Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to leave the case in the hands of the six-member panel, which last Monday rejected hearings on a 3-to-3 party-line vote.

Instead of hearings, the committee agreed to make public all the information it has gathered in the case and began meeting Tuesday to determine disciplinary action, which could range from a reprimand to expulsion. It earlier found “substantial credible evidence” that Packwood made unwanted sexual advances to 17 women, solicited lobbyists for jobs for his former wife and altered his diaries in anticipation that they would be subpoenaed by the ethics committee .

McConnell hailed the outcome as a “vote of confidence for a process that has worked exceedingly well for 31 years.” But committee Vice Chairman Richard H. Bryan, D-Nev., said failure to hold hearings would “undermine public confidence and support for the ultimate decision” in the case, and committee member Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., said it “once again makes women the victim” by denying those who brought the allegations against Packwood a voice and visibility in the process.

Three Republicans - William S. Cohen (Maine), Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) and Arlen Specter (Pa.) - crossed party lines to vote for hearings. Only one Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (N.Y.), ranking minority member of the Finance Committee and one of Packwood’s main defenders, voted against holding hearings. Twelve Democrats joined 50 Republicans in supporting McConnell’s proposal to leave the matter with the ethics committee.

Packwood did not participate in the debate but voted against hearings. Earlier, he had declined to exercise his right to hearings.

The votes followed a tense and sometimes testy four-hour debate that culminated in an angry speech by Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole, R-Kan., who characterized Boxer’s move as “a transparent effort to score political points” that could lead to politicization of the Senate ethics process and its collapse. “This may be good media, but it’s bad policy,” he snapped. At one point, he suggested that if Boxer won, the Senate might just as well “turn it (the committee) over to the senator from California.”

Boxer was equally tough on the Republicans, describing McConnell’s counterproposal as a “feel-good, over-yourself” measure that discredited the Senate by denying victims of alleged misconduct a right to be heard in person by the committee. “What the Republicans have done by voting against public hearings is a miscarriage of justice, any way you slice it,” she said.

Responding to her colleagues’ complaints that hearings would embarrass the Senate, Snowe, the only Republican to speak out for hearings, said the Senate could be embarrassed only by “our lack of action … our failure to open these hearings … and our embrace of the institutional sanctuary of closed doors.”

Sometimes with passion, sometimes with dry legalisms, senators lined up, largely along party lines, behind two long-standing precedents that had come into conflict in the Packwood case.

Boxer and her allies argued that the committee’s decision violated a 76-year tradition of holding hearings in all major ethics cases and threatened to further erode public confidence in Congress’ willingness to discipline its members.

Opponents countered that the ethics process was created 31 years ago to insulate the discipline of members from outside pressure and could be crippled by being made a “political football” on the Senate floor. Never before, they said, had the Senate threatened to intervene in the process before a final committee decision is reached.

“This is our opportunity to send a message to the American people that fits the message they sent to us last November: The public expects their government to be open and to hold its members accountable to a proper standard of behavior,” Bryan said. “The message the Senate risks sending today, however, is that in disciplinary matters involving members, we have chosen to retreat and close the door tighter than it has ever been closed before.”

In response, McConnell said a Senate vote to countermand the committee would mark “the beginning of the end of the ethics process and a return to the bad old days,” when decisions were made on a partisan basis. “This motion is about political gamesmanship,” added Sen. Hank Brown, R-Colo.

Democrats cried foul on political grounds, too. If senators were willing to rely solely on depositions, affidavits and other papers, “the Whitewater hearings should end today,” said Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass.