Republican prosecutors accusing President Clinton of "serial lying under oath" called for his removal from office and told the Senate that its job was to excise the "cancer" that existed in the body politic. The opening day of the President's impeachment trial before the Senate, which has been turned into a courtroom with 100 senator-jurors, was marked by harsh accusatory language from the team of Republican prosecutors or "managers" from the House of Representatives. Their task is to try and prove that Mr Clinton is guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice arising out of his affair with Ms Monica Lewinsky.
The prosecutors also urged that witnesses be called to help the senators to decide that the President lied under oath repeatedly in his grand jury testimony last August.
The White House was angered when, on the eve of the trial, the leading prosecutor, Mr Henry Hyde, told reporters that the team was considering also calling the President himself to testify.
The White House spokesman, Mr Joe Lockhart, retorted that Mr Clinton had testified enough about his affair with Ms Lewinsky and related events and cast doubt on whether he would appear if asked.
"I think this late-hour request from Henry Hyde just once again illustrates that this is really about politics," Mr Lockhart said yesterday.
The White House also said that the President had no plans to watch his trial. As it began, he attended a crime prevention gathering of police officers in Alexandria across the Potomac river from Capitol Hill.
Later he worked on his State of the Union speech to be delivered to both houses of Congress next Tuesday, the same day as his lawyers begin his defence.
Mr Hyde introduced the prosecuting team to the senators sitting silently at their desks after Chief Justice William Rehnquist declared the trial open at 1.04 p.m. Washington time. Mr Hyde said that the Senate was now the steward of the public oath.
"Depending on what you decide, it will either be strengthened in its power to achieve justice or it will go the way of so much of our moral infrastructure and become a mere convention, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," Mr Hyde said.
Congressman James Sensenbrenner followed with an hour-long opening statement setting out the two articles of impeachment voted by the House last month. "If the Senate is convinced that President Clinton lied under oath and does not remove him from office, the wrong message is given to our courts, those who have business before them, and to the country as a whole," Mr Sensenbrenner said.
If the Senate allowed the President's "perjurious, false and misleading statements" to go unpunished, "what do we tell the approximately 115 people now in federal prison for the crime of perjury?"
"Failure to bring President Clinton to account for his serial lying under oath and preventing the courts from administering equal justice under law will cause a cancer to be present in society for generations," Mr Sensenbrenner told the Senate.
A two-thirds majority of the 100 senators will be required to convict President Clinton on one or both of the charges. After the defence has presented its case next week and the senators ask questions, there will be a vote by simple majority on whether to end the trial or to proceed. If it proceeds there will also be a vote to decide on the calling of witnesses.