LOW-KEY SESSION INCHES TOWARD HISTORY.

Byline: R.W. Apple Jr. The New York Times

By word and deed, in answering pollsters' questions and in casting midterm ballots last month, a majority of the voters of America have made it pluperfectly clear that they do not wish to see President Clinton removed from office through the impeachment process.

Yet the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee are charging down the road that leads to precisely that. Nothing anyone has said or done, not the harsh words of some of the president's defenders on the committee, not the softer words of his lawyers testifying before it, not even Clinton's own 11th-hour statement Friday afternoon, stayed the Republicans' hands.

Rep. Lindsey Graham, an iconoclast from South Carolina, said before Clinton spoke that he might opt for censure instead of impeachment if the president admitted in some way to ``criminal wrongdoing.''

But in a short, subdued four-minute speech, Clinton came nowhere near to doing that. Instead, he said he would accept censure - something his aides have been saying for days - reiterated his remorse over his conduct - something Graham had derided before the fact as ``another lip-biting apology'' - and called again for everyone to buckle down to doing the nation's work.

Anticlimax perfumed the air a few minutes later when Graham and the 20 other Republican committee members voted for the first article of impeachment to come before them, which accuses Clinton of perjury. All but one voted for a second perjury article early Friday evening, with Graham breaking ranks on that occasion. White House nose-counters have told the president he stands no better than an even chance of avoiding impeachment on one article by the full House next week, which would set up a Senate trial in January.

Historic, banal

It was a historic day, of course, as everyone kept saying, but banal as well, utterly lacking in the soaring language and high-minded debate that transfixed the nation a quarter-century ago, in July 1974, when the committee voted on articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. At one point members picked nits with each other over whether Clinton had been properly sworn for his grand jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky investigation.

The session had the compelling drama of a debate on a highway bill. Some spectators' seats were empty. Network television gave it a pass.

That could be accounted for, at least in part, by the almost universal belief in Washington that the Republicans will fail to muster the two-thirds vote that would be needed to convict Clinton and remove him from office. In a sense, the Judiciary Committee Republicans had a free play, like a quarterback who can throw a pass without fear of interception when a penalty against the defensive team has been whistled before he releases the ball.

Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, the House Republican whip, stated the thesis the other day. Impeachment, he said, is ``like a grand jury that looks at the evidence, and the House decides whether the evidence warrants sending it to the Senate for trial.'' Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., echoed his words Friday afternoon, telling his colleagues that what they were doing was ``similar to drafting an indictment'' in a criminal case.

``Impeachment in the House, acquittal in the Senate,'' said another Republican member, ``is super-censure, the most effective we have.''

Some disagreed, of course. Rep. Barney Frank, the cerebral Massachusetts Democrat, said gruffly that in voting to impeach Clinton, the Republicans were ``voting for a resolution that says you want him thrown out of office,'' like it or not. From the viewpoint of most Democrats, approval in the committee makes approval in the House more likely, and a Senate trial, regardless of the outcome, would take time and sully Clinton's reputation even further.

Eroding power

He would be only the second president ever to face trial in the Senate, after Andrew Johnson, and his ability to function effectively, already eroded, would be further curtailed. Even now, he is neither trusted on Capitol Hill nor feared by Saddam Hussein and other enemies of the United States.

Nevertheless, some Republican members who harbored private qualms no doubt took refuge behind the conviction that nothing they did Friday was final. That assumption, like so many others in this saga, may prove fallacious, but at the moment it is pervasive.

Yet the explanation for Friday's vote is more complicated than that.

Some Republican representatives have seen Clinton as unfit for the presidency almost from the start of his term, and have never considered voting any other way than the way they voted Friday. Barr, the first member to call for impeachment, is described by his colleagues as falling into that category. He is not alone.

Other Republican members, especially outside the committee, have been offended by White House tactics. Once ready, or almost ready, to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt, they have hardened against him.

When his party did far better than anticipated in the elections last month, Clinton and his advisers, like President Nixon and his, concluded that the impeachment campaign had spent its momentum. They mistook a break in the clouds for lasting sunshine. Abandoning their conciliatory tone, the president's lawyers sent provocatively unresponsive answers to 81 questions posed by the committee.

Some were also highly critical of Clinton's efforts to mobilize business leaders in their districts to accuse them of harming the economy by pressing ahead with impeachment.

The politics of the situation are complex and by no means always decisive. Rep. Marge Roukema of New Jersey, a moderate who might have drawn a conservative primary challenge if she had voted against impeachment, decided to vote for it. Rep. Amo Houghton of upstate New York, another moderate, was in a similar situation; his stand against impeachment evoked a threat from Jim Pierce, a heretofore marginal conservative candidate.

A popular move?

Privately, some Republicans said they thought a vote to impeach would prove, in the long run, to be popular with the electorate and therefore helpful at election time in 2000. Others thought not, though several said that public opposition to ousting Clinton was combined with an indifference that had made it very difficult for the president to rally public support.

Publicly, leading Republicans on the committee spoke of principle and of the necessity of doing one's duty without regard to the polls' verdict.

Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, the committee's 74-year-old chairman, urged his colleagues to ``vote for our honor, which is the only thing we get to take with us to the grave.'' A similar tack was taken by Rep. Bob Inglis, a South Carolina Republican, in his own 10-minute statement.

``Thank goodness we're not a pure democracy,'' he said, because that would mean the majority always ruled, on every issue. If Baptists outnumbered Roman Catholics, he continued, they could outlaw Mass if they wished to.

But instead, Inglis said, ``we're a constitutional republic,'' whose legislators owe allegiance to that document and not to public whim.