BY CHUCK RAASCH
Gannett News Service
WASHINGTON - Are we nearing the end of a long national nightmare, as some have put it, or is this just a prelude to more agonizing drama? The answer now belongs to the full House of Representatives, the people's House.
It promises to be an intense week of politicking over a president's fitness to hold office, the likes of which Americans have not seen since Richard Nixon was forced out of office before the House could impeach him in 1974.
As the House Judiciary Committee finished arduous, often tortuous, work on impeachment articles Saturday, the Democrats tried to raise the stakes for the country and the economy. Republicans tried to minimize them by arguing that America and its Constitution are stronger than any one person or any one crisis.
As they voted for a fourth, stripped-down article of impeachment Saturday, civility sometimes frayed.
It was impasse politics, contentious politics, party-line politics.
Throughout, one of the most ideologically split committees in Congress could barely agree to disagree.
Democrats, worried that the votes may be there for Mr. Clinton to be the first president impeached by the House since Andrew Johnson during Reconstruction, spent Friday and Saturday in furious counterattacks to raise the stakes.
Rather than being a simple exercise of constitutional duties, they asserted, the impeachment of a president on such non-statecraft matters as lying about a sexual affair could force a constitutional and economic crisis that itself would be the true threat to the state.
"This does sometimes, to some people, take on the appearance of a coup," the committee's top Democrat, John Conyers of Michigan, said in a statement that drew sharp rebukes from committee Republicans. "That's anything but the case," retorted James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican.
"Impeachment," he continued, "is not removal."
It is a delicate, high-stakes game for both sides.
Mr. Clinton, the protagonist in this drama, is reduced to a forgiveness-seeking bystander to his own fate. The bully pulpit no longer at his disposal, he several times has kneeled at the public altar of forgiveness, but not to the extent his critics have demanded.
Meanwhile, the stakes rise.
For congressional Democrats, who have ridiculed the GOP case against Mr. Clinton, the trick is not to so trivialize it that moderate Republicans who might have accepted censure will be pushed to vote for impeachment.
"Let me just make one last appeal to moderate Republicans," Democratic National Committee Chairman Roy Romer told MSNBC Friday night. "Censure the president" and end "this mess."
Then, in a rising Democratic mantra, he attempted to raise the stakes.
"I'm worried about what happens to the stock market over the next few days" now that impeachment articles have been voted by the committee, Mr. Romer said.
Nodding to public opinion that says most people don't want Mr. Clinton to go unpunished, Mr. Romer said that "censure is the people's consequence."
But the censure drumbeat is fainter, at least for now, than the drumbeat for impeachment.
Republicans gingerly have stepped through a public reaction minefield largely by portraying themselves as doing the work laid out in the Constitution for an accused president.
That argument may have been made more palatable when even Mr. Clinton's lawyers conceded the president's actions in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, while not impeachable, were "morally reprehensible." That's a far different, and more complex, argument than if they had maintained, as Mr. Clinton had for most of the year, that the president had done nothing wrong.
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