WASHINGTON, Feb. 8--Boy, am I pooped. Nothing like impeaching a president to take it out of a man, except maybe for that breech birth in Eads back in '83--fourteen hours on a two-headed piglet, as I recall. Funny water they got in that town. Some of my Democratic colleagues must be swigging the same stuff. Today Feinstein asks me if I'll support a motion for censure. "Only if your guy agrees to say that he's been a bad, bad, bad, bad boy," I quip, toying with her. We've got 51 votes locked up to convict. We don't need no stinking censure.
Feb. 9--Hatch "reminds" me we need a two-thirds majority to remove the president. That's 66--no, 67 votes. Heck, I wish somebody would have told me sooner. Must ask my staff if they knew. Ran my speech for tomorrow by Joanie. She suggested I delete the words "whoremonger," "Jezebel," "chief executive sodomite" and "an office tainted by vile secrets and secretions." I've always believed in calling them as I see them, but she's right. Temperance in defense of virtue is no vice.
Feb. 10--Speech went okay. Nine minutes, no jeers. At three Trent had a nice break-time buffet in his office: Hawaiian Punch, cocktail weenies, a bundt cake and this fancy orange sherbert made by a conservative think tank that's going to give Ben & Jerry a run for their tired old liberal money. I was on my second helping when who should walk in but Jeffords, Chaffee and Arlen "The Defector" Specter, fresh from announcing that they won't vote to impeach. Four of us--Craig, Lugar, Dewine and yours truly--closed ranks around the chow.
"No punch for rat finks," Dewine hissed.
"How about a knuckle sandwich?" Lugar growled.
I've never been prouder to call myself a Republican.
Feb. 11--Trent says it's up to me to find out what Campbell is thinking. Ben's been cagey, not letting anybody know where he stands. A regular prima donna. So I sit him down, and he starts in on how much it cost him in goodwill back home when he came over to the GOP, the Lamms tell everyone not to buy his jewelry, he never got the corner office he was promised, blah blah blah.
"That's fine, Ben," I say, "but are you with us?"
He gives me this gulley-washer about how he and Clinton both come from broken homes, he knows what it's like "to have to connive to survive," he can't judge another man until he's walked a mile in his moccasins, and so on. On one hand this, on the other hand that. Back and forth. I tell him it's just dandy to be so evenhanded, but don't go peeing down both legs at once. I don't think he got my meaning.
Feb. 12--Well, it's over. All the speeches. All the heartache. All the flapdoodle. Ben came through, but in the end, we couldn't even get a simple majority on either perjury or obstruction because of the rat-fink factor. Feinstein tried to revive her censure bid but was slapped down hard by Gramm. Daschle blew a party horn in my ear and offered me a cigar. I told him no thanks, I didn't know where it had been. Then I ran to pick up Joanie and catch the last plane to Denver (we'd had to rebook twice!), marveling at my own poise in the face of adversity.
Thus ends Senator Wayne Allard's observations as a juror in the impeachment trial--usually told to Rocky Mountain News Washington bureau reporter Michael Romano, but in this case pulled from the News's trash basket.
