Impeachment

SEOUL, South Korea - The turbulent, year-old presidency of South Korea's Roh Moo Hyun was hit with its most serious political challenge to date yesterday when the two main opposition parties initiated impeachment proceedings in Parliament. The motion to impeach the president, unprecedented in South Korea, follows a series of corruption scandals and Roh's messy divorce from his political party. In the incident that prompted the impeachment proceedings, opponents complained that the plainspoken labor lawyer was trying to manipulate parliamentary elections scheduled for next month.

HARTFORD, Conn. - As the realization sinks in that Republican Gov. John G. Rowland is not going to resign, more state residents support a legislative inquiry that could lead to his impeachment. The latest poll by the University of Connecticut, completed yesterday, shows that 64 percent want the impeachment inquiry to begin, an 8 percentage point increase compared with those polled a week earlier. The number of people who want the governor to resign remained at 63 percent. The number of people who said they would vote to impeach Rowland - that is, to see him tried in the state Senate - also remained steady, at 54 percent.

HARTFORD, Conn. - State House Speaker Moira K. Lyons said last night that House Democrats have decided either to create an investigative committee or to begin impeachment proceedings against Gov. John G. Rowland. House Democrats who met in a closed-door caucus for about seven hours were leaning toward beginning the impeachment process against Rowland, a Republican, Lyons said. Lyons, of Stamford, said caucus members concluded that there was only one other option: forming an investigative committee with subpoena power.

BOSTON - Gov. John G. Rowland of Connecticut apologized yesterday for lying about gifts he accepted but pledged to remain in office despite a federal corruption probe and calls for his resignation or impeachment. "I lied, and there are no excuses," the governor said in a six-minute speech televised throughout New England. "I should have known better, and I do know better." Rowland's plea for forgiveness came one day after federal criminal investigators served the three-term Republican governor with a grand jury subpoena in connection with a probe of improvements made to Rowland's vacation cottage.

WASHINGTON -- The Reagans, the controversial made-for-TV movie, finally made its way into American homes this week -- but not nearly as many homes as originally planned after CBS moved it to its smaller, premium cable channel Showtime. I watched the entire three-hour melodrama in order to participate in a special Showtime panel discussion, aired after the movie, along with five other people who were invited to comment. The other guests included Reagan biographer and former Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon; veteran newsman Marvin Kalb; longtime Reagan adviser Martin Anderson, who is also the editor of three published collections of Ronald Reagan's letters, speeches and radio commentaries; and two Reagan critics, AIDS activist Hilary Rosen and the film's co-producer, Carl Anthony.

WASHINGTON - Though Bill Clinton has been out of office for weeks, exiled to suburban New York, his ex-presidency is looking more and more like his presidency. His Oval Office finale - in which he moved out furniture that turned out to be White House property, picked out swank Manhattan digs to set up his taxpayer-financed office and granted a last-minute pardon to a well-connected fugitive financier - has provoked public outrage, congressional hearings, a possible criminal investigation, even a new whisper of a second impeachment.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but rolling blackouts in California. Holding the Super Bowl in Tampa is probably all right, as long as the state of Florida isn't made official scorekeeper. Bill finally earned his impeachment, with those midnight pardons of unrepentant evil-doers. The jury that found Eric Stennett guiltless made Baltimore safer for crooks and scarier for everyone else.

MANILA, Philippines - The Philippine Senate indefinitely adjourned the impeachment trial of President Joseph Estrada yesterday as tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand the president's resignation. The Senate, which had voted not to accept new evidence of alleged payoffs to the president, concluded that it could not continue the impeachment case after all 11 prosecutors resigned in protest of the Tuesday vote. The decision to suspend the hearing handed Estrada a significant victory as he fights to keep his job in the face of allegations that he accepted at least $74 million in illegal payments.

It will go down as one of the most bizarre chapters in U.S. political history: Two politicians fight for survival as lawyers parse the Constitution in search of a winning argument while the media report - then correct - the details and the public waits out the whole mess. No, it's not George W. Bush vs. Al Gore. It's Newt Gingrich vs. Bill Clinton, in the 1998 battle over presidential impeachment and for the hearts and minds of the American people. While the Bush and Gore camps continue their Battle of Palm Beach, an audience at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts in Annapolis will return to the impeachment saga as Chevy Chase film director Michael Pack shows and talks about his documentary on the former U.S. House speaker, "The Fall of Newt Gingrich."

WHAT HAPPENS in a democracy modeled on the U.S. Constitution when the people in their wisdom elect an inadequate president? One lacking the moral and ethical integrity required? What if his personal behavior is deplorable and then someone comes forward with accounts of actual crime? And what if, even then, the people want him to fulfill the constitutional term of office? Are they frivolous, or do they understand the need for stable institutions better than the privileged elite? These questions are prompted by the plight of Joseph Estrada, elected president of the Philippines for a six-year term two years ago. The one-time rugged star of Filipino action movies who went on to a solid political career has an aura that is hard to beat.