WASHINGTON - On a day of history and upheaval, President William Jefferson Clinton was impeached by the Republican-controlled House on Saturday for perjury and obstruction of justice. The 42nd chief executive thus became only the second since the nation's founding to be ordered to stand trial in the Senate.
A defiant Clinton rejected calls for resignation and vowed to remain in office "until the last hour of the last day of my term." He called for a "reasonable, bipartisan and proportionate" conclusion in the Senate to end the ordeal.
The drama of impeachment - written into the Constitution more than two centuries ago but scarcely seen since - played out on a day made even more tumultuous by a stunning announcement that incoming House Speaker Bob Livingston would resign over his own marital infidelities. Republicans quickly coalesced around Illinois Rep. Dennis Hastert to replace him.
"We have fulfilled our duty to our magnificent Constitution," Livingston, R-La., said shortly before the roll was called in the House on presidential articles of impeachment for the first time in 130 years. "We are not ruled by kings or emperors, and there is no divine right of presidents."
Democrats, buoyed by a last-minute meeting with first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, marched out of the House chamber briefly to protest the Republicans' refusal to allow a vote on the lesser punishment of censure.
"We walked out to demonstrate our deep displeasure with the action of the majority party in clearly disregarding the wishes of the majority of the American people," said Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt on the steps outside the Capitol.
With that, Gephardt led Democrats back inside, where majority Republicans waited unflinchingly with the votes to approve the first article of impeachment. It alleged that Clinton committed perjury before Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's grand jury in August when asked about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
"Article one is approved," intoned Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., who presided over the tumultuous, two-day debate. The clock read 1:25 p.m.
The vote was 228-206 in favor of impeachment. Five Democrats sided with Republicans and five GOP lawmakers backed the president.
In rapid-fire order, the other three articles were voted on, all of them stemming from Starr's eight-month investigation and the politically drenched House impeachment inquiry that followed this fall.
The second article, alleging Clinton lied in a deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, was rejected, 229-205. More than two dozen Republicans joined Democrats in voting it down, and some of them expressed concern about voting to impeach a president for actions in a civil case that has since been dismissed.
The third article, alleging obstruction of justice, cleared narrowly, 221-212, and needed the votes of five Democrats to pass. It cited Clinton for efforts to influence grand jury testimony by Ms. Lewinsky and Betty Currie, his secretary, as well as other actions.
The fourth article fell, 285-148, on a bipartisan rejection. It would have impeached Clinton for abuse of his office in lying to Congress in written responses to 81 questions that the House Judiciary Committee posed to him as part of its impeachment inquiry.
The House floor was crowded as lawmakers cast their historic votes. All but one of the 435 was present. The only exception was Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., who is recovering from hip replacement surgery in California.
A subdued ripple of applause floated up to the galleries when the total for the first article of impeachment went over a majority of 218, but in keeping with the solemnity of the moment, it died out quickly.
The galleries were full, and a crowd gathered outside the Capitol on a day unlike any other in over a century.
Livingston's bombshell aside, the nation was absorbing news of the latest round of airstrikes against Iraq, a campaign that prompted some Republicans to openly question whether Clinton was using his powers as commander in chief to try to manipulate the impeachment process.
On the White House lawn after the vote, dozens of Democratic lawmakers gathered around the president in a show of support. Clinton emerged from the building arm in arm with his wife.
"I have accepted responsibility for what I did wrong in my personal life," he said in his first appearance before the nartion as an impeached president. "I have invited members of Congress to find a reasonable, bipartisan and proportionate response."
His spokesman, Joe Lockhart, Clinton "is going to keep on pushing his agenda forward and I think that it would be wrong to give in to this insidious politics of personal destruction, which seems so pervasive in this town now," Lockhart said.
The votes came 11 months after a visibly agitated Clinton appeared on television to tell the nation, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."
In the months since, Starr has interrogated dozens of witnesses, granted immunity to Ms. Lewinsky and was himself subjected to a brutal political assault by Clinton's defenders. Starr submitted a formal report to Congress in September outlining evidence of possibly impeachable offenses by the president.
Republicans insisted on an open-ended impeachment inquiry. Democrats, who resisted, gained five seats in the fall elections in what was widely viewed as a repudiation of GOP handling of the Lewinsky matter.
But Republicans persisted, and on a bitter party-line vote, the Judiciary Committee sent the full House four articles of impeachment largely patterned on Starr's evidence.
Moments after the final vote on the floor, Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., led a somber procession across the Capitol Rotunda to the Senate, delivering the impeachment papers to officials there.
A trial will follow in January, and already Democrats are digging in.
"We cannot allow any president - Republican or Democrat - to be forced from office on a party-line vote in the House of Representatives. In America, the president serves at the will of the people, not at the pleasure of the House," said Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota.
Democrats who voted against impeachment were united in their condemnation of Clinton's actions, but said Republicans were overreaching.
"Today is a very sad day for America," said Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. "Today, when I got up, I wanted to cry."
But Republicans insisted the evidence showed clearly that Clinton had violated his oath, and his offenses amounted to the "high crimes and misdemeanors" that warrant impeachment.
"The rule of law, a phrase we've heard more often than not, is in real danger today if we cheapen the oath," said Hyde. "And when you have a serial violator of the oath who is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States ... you have a problem."
The Senate trial will be the first since Andrew Johnson was president. He was acquitted in 1868, when the Senate fell one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed to remove him in a proceeding that arose from the bitter residue of the Civil War.
The impeachment of Clinton arose instead from his personal behavior and his attempts to cover up the relationship with a White House intern scarcely older than his daughter.
But the political dynamics are similar in one respect - Johnson, too, was impeached on a nearly party-line vote in the House of Representatives.
The only other president subjected to serious impeachment proceedings was Richard Nixon. Unlike Clinton, he faced articles of impeachment approved by a bipartisan majority of the House Judiciary Committee. His support among congressional Republicans eroded, he quit in 1974 rather than face impeachment in the full House.
Democrats started their day at a closed-door caucus attended by Mrs. Clinton. An attorney, Mrs. Clinton recalled her own service as a young lawyer on the Judiciary Committee at the time of impeachment proceedings against Nixon, according to one source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, and thanked lawmakers for their defense of her husband.
On a more personal note, she said she loves her husband, participants said.
By The Associated Press