Gallegly Wades Into Starr Report

Rep. Elton Gallegly did more than build his granddaughter’s playhouse last weekend, but nothing quite as therapeutic.

A member of the House Judiciary Committee, the Simi Valley Republican left the firestorm in Washington on Friday night for a scheduled trip back home. He toted the very latest in airplane reading--a copy of Kenneth Starr’s 445-page report on President Clinton and a preliminary rebuttal from the White House.

Gallegly is one of the 37 representatives who are to determine whether the independent counsel has unearthed evidence sufficient for the entire House to consider impeachment proceedings.

Gallegly plunged into the report on the plane and later at home. He attended a couple of local events, including the county Republicans’ annual barbecue. Sunday afternoon, the accomplished cabinetmaker tried to drown the din of high crimes and misdemeanors with the buzz of power tools.

“Stepping away from it all for a couple or three hours helps me clear my head,” he said. “I completed the playhouse by way of therapy.”

But the flying sawdust hardly clarified the complex issues confronting Gallegly and the rest of the committee. Back in Washington on Monday, he said he still must sift through 2,600 pages of evidence before reaching even a tentative conclusion on the president’s fate. Like many others in Congress, he said he does not yet know just what constitutes “high crimes and misdemeanors” or whether the formidable term fits any of Clinton’s activities.

If politicians find it difficult to grapple with the Starr report and all its seamy detail, families can find it nearly impossible. Asked how he would advise parents to help their children understand the crisis in Washington, Gallegly, the father of four grown kids, paused and said: “Carefully.”

“I feel fortunate I’m at the point in my life where I don’t have to sit down and describe in detail to my fourth- or fifth-grader how they’re going to explain this as a ‘current event’ in school,” he said.

“It’s a difficult task. But I’m not as concerned for those families that sit down and get together and talk as for those who don’t.”

Maintaining a careful neutrality, Gallegly declined to discuss in detail the options for Clinton that have been so intensively explored for the last few days on talk shows and around dining-room tables.

However, he said that most of the 300-plus callers to his office since Friday have urged that “something be done”--but only in an orderly and judicious manner.

“One thing I’ve found is that my constituents are much more thoughtful and intense, and concerned more with the issue than with a quick fix,” he said. “People want the Congress to proceed and get a resolution, not just to say, ‘Drop it’ or ‘Hang him.’ ”

In the meantime, he acknowledged, legislators and the public are increasingly exasperated.

“We still have a tremendous amount of other work to be done here--appropriations bills, health care, education, Social Security . . . “ Gallegly said. “It’s incumbent upon us to move ahead, and I’m absolutely confident we’re going to do that and address this issue in an appropriate way.”

People who complain about the lengthy process can look to Clinton himself, Gallegly said.

“The White House has been without question the reason this process has dragged on as long as it has,” Gallegly said. “The delays, the dilatory tactics, the stonewalling have caused this thing to go well beyond what it has had to.”

While some Democrats have criticized Starr’s report as needlessly explicit, Gallegly pointed to the prosecutor’s dilemma.

On the one hand, he said, the specifics of sexual activities are necessary to counter earlier contentions by the president that his relationship with Monica Lewinsky was not sexual.

“But if they had been paraphrased or condensed in any way, shape or form, the independent counsel would have been persecuted for taking editorial privilege,” Gallegly said. “It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

The first nonlawyer to serve on the judiciary committee, Gallegly exercised some lawyerly caution in his comments Monday.

He declined to say whether the president’s problems would help Republicans at the polls in November.

“In politics, six or seven weeks can be an eternity,” he said. “No one should be speculating on this.”

Asked whether the scandal has tarnished Clinton’s status as a moral leader, Gallegly said: “The president of the United States by most folks’ standards is a role model not just for the country but for the world. . . . At the very least, this is an embarrassment.”