January 27, 1999 -- The "2-stage vote option" is a monumental sucker play.

A special group of six "procedure" advisers handpicked by Sen. Trent Lott -- all Republicans, not a single Democrat -- are trumpeting the idea that conviction on charges in the Articles (perjury or obstruction) would stand as "the ultimate censure." These Senators are saying that, if the President is convicted ("found in fact to have perjured or obstructed"), they wouldn't necessarily have to remove him from office because they could vote against actual removal in a "second vote."

This "finding of fact" vote would be unconstitutional because conviction for crimes alleged in the Articles requires removal. Conviction on the Articles includes the decision as to whether the offenses reach the level of "high crimes against the state." Conviction includes the decision that removal is necessary.

The plan would be contrary to the prohibition against a "bill of attainder," meaning that the Senate cannot convict as a form of punishment and allow the President thereafter to remain in office. If criminal charges are at issue and they constitute impeachable high crimes, the idea is to remove the President to make him available for criminal prosecution and conviction in a criminal court. If the charges are sub-impeachable, the President faces proper criminal prosecution as soon as he leaves office. The Senate should not usurp the criminal function. "Finding of fact" is a misleadingly clinical phrase hiding the fact that criminal punishment is their aim. As soon as the first "finding of fact" vote is over, the language will switch to "conviction" and "found guilty."

The hope for Republicans is to increase momentum toward removal in the second vote and/or to massively weaken the President by "convicting" him and letting him stay.

The Senate GOP seeks to use the same trick employed by Tom DeLay and others in the House to get the articles passed in the first place. The House GOP argued "impeachment is the ultimate censure; it doesn't really mean that the President has to be removed from office." That argument sounded benign but once impeachment articles passed, it was suddenly deadly serious. Four House Republicans recanted their votes, realizing they were wrong to vote for impeachment when they didn't believe the President should be removed.

In the same bait and switch maneuver on the Senate side, if Senators find the President guilty on either charge in the Senate -- thinking of such a vote as merely a "form of censure" -- we'll hear immediate GOP protests about leaving a convicted criminal in office, putting pressure on removal in the "second vote." If the President is found guilty (or a "finding of fact" is made) on either charge and he is not removed from office, we'll hear for the rest of his term that the President is a "convicted criminal."

While the second vote to remove takes a two-thirds concensus, the first vote to convict on perjury or obstruction takes only a majority -- which the Republicans could easily achieve since they hold the majority hammer.

It's a set-up to split the charges of "crimes" away from removability and the last step in a progression from the original fallacy of allowing the alleged offenses to be accepted in the first place as impeachable "high crimes against the state." The offenses never reached that level, as eloquently and clearly explained by Sen. Dale Bumpers as well as several hundred law professors, historians and Constitutional scholars. But the House shoe-horned the charges into the "impeachable" mold by majority vote of Republicans. Once that happened, it opened the way for this disingenuous 2-stage vote proposal to take place in the Senate.

The fact that Senate Republicans are seriously suggesting the 2-stage option means that the original impeachment in the House was illegitimate because, had it been legitimate, impeachment would have meant that conviction on the Articles warranted removal from office, as envisioned by the framers of the Constitution -- and as stated in the articles themselves. The 2-stage "split" says that is not true.

Both frauds depend upon the Republicans' cynical use of the concept of "censure" as a seductive come-on for achieving the sought-after goal of full impeachment in the House and, in the Senate, conviction -- but perhaps not removal -- for alleged crimes, circumventing the Constitution's impeachment clause and accomplishing, if not removal of the President, devastating political conviction for sub-impeachable offenses.

Simply put, impeachment is about removal, censure is about censure, and criminal conviction is about criminal conviction, not political punishment. They all serve different purposes and it would insult the Constitution to try to perform a criminal function in the political court of the Senate.

The term "coup" has been used by many to describe the impeachment situation. In this proposed 2-stage vote, we see that the coup is not simply to overturn an election. Impeachment is designed properly to overturn elections if impeachable offenses have been committed. In this case, they have not been. The coup here is an attempt to overturn the Constitution.

The danger now is that all eyes are on the far sexier witness list and not on the flim-flam of the 2-stage vote which may come up quickly and do its profound damage before we know what hit us.

-- Jane Prettyman