It was strangely appropriate to find the House Banking Committee Wednesday locked in a bitter debate over the failure of a small Arkansas thrift.
Six years ago to the day, President Bush had signed the savings and loan bailout law. And in many ways, Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan symbolized the worst abuses of the thrift industry: mindless land speculation, lax supervision, and the intervention of elected officials in regulatory matters.
But Wednesday marked another anniversary as well, one that also invites comparison with this week's hearings. It was 21 years ago, on Aug. 9, 1974, that President Nixon resigned under the cloud of Watergate.
Nobody seriously believes that Whitewater will ever rise to the level of a presidential crisis, as Watergate did. But there are similarities between the two proceedings that are hard to set aside.
The issues in both: money, politics, and allegations of abused power. The combatants in both fiercely partisan battles: a sitting president and the congressional party in power.
Then as now, the House Banking Committee was deeply involved in the investigation. Wright Patman, the Texas Democrat who led the panel in the 1970s, smelled corruption and began hearings soon after the Watergate burglary, just as Rep. Jim Leach now senses abuses.
And as was the case two decades ago, the Banking Committee inquiry has sparked a bitter partisan debate.
The stakes are high. Madison Guaranty funneled money into the Whitewater development company, in which President Clinton was a major investor, as well as Clinton campaign funds. Rep. Leach is using the hearings to discover whether the administration hindered efforts to investigate the Madison-Whitewater connection.
Industry lobbyists watched from afar Wednesday with a growing sense of unease, worried that the proceedings were becoming so contentious that a residue of partisanship would linger long after the inquiry was closed.
For the record, most of the panel's members say the proceedings will be quickly forgotten.
"We're divided on other things, like insurance and banking," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "Besides, we're all big boys and girls, and we'll get over it."
Maybe. But watching the hearings, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that they are poisoning the politics of a Banking Committee that still must deal with issues important to the financial services industry.
Rep. Barney Frank used sarcasm like a whip, admonishing Rep. Leach at one point that there was "no rule against hurting the chairman's feelings."
Rep. Leach, ordinarily the very model of calm decorum, could be seen pounding his gavel like a jackhammer and shouting to be heard as members traded accusations.
The committee chairman was the target of much Democratic sniping - surprising, considering that the Iowa Republican has always been known as a maverick who cares a great deal more about ideas than party affiliation.
It is also a bit ironic, given Rep. Leach's understated approach to the inquiry. Whitewater, he said last year, was likely to be more of an embarrassment to President Clinton than a constitutional crisis.
He still holds that view. "It would be my enormous hope and expectation that this will not turn into a constitutional crisis," he said in an interview this week.
But Rep. Leach is unhappy with what he sees as a White House strategy of stonewalling the committee's Republican majority and using congressional Democrats to turn the hearings into a partisan brawl.
The Democrats hope to present a picture of partisanship to the American people, he said, gambling that the public will simply tune out the proceedings without rendering a decision on whether administration figures tried to stop the investigation of Whitewater and Madison Guaranty.
So far, he said, "the Democrats are holding their own in terms of rhetoric."
Politicians are accustomed to arguing loudly in the morning and shaking hands in the afternoon. But debates rarely become this bitter. And it may take some time before the Banking Committee's Republicans and Democrats are ready to put this episode behind them.
