The tensions in the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate as the impeachment debate drags on recalls a joke that has been circulating on the Internet for a year now: Had Bill Clinton been the ‘Titanic’, the iceberg would have sunk.

For the past year, bolstered by majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives and the allegations that Clinton lied about an affair with a former White House intern, the Republicans threatened to be the iceberg battering Clinton’s second term.

But as the Senate perjury and obstruction of justice trial against Clinton grinds into its third week, the Republicans are the ones who seem damaged by the experience.

In a Newsweek poll this week, 43 percent of registered Republican respondents argued that the impeachment process had hurt their party; only 12 percent believed it had helped.

On Wednesday, the Senate defeated a Democratic move to dismiss the trial and voted after considerable rancour to call three witnesses – former intern Monica Lewinsky, presidential adviser Sidney Blumenthal and Vernon Jordan, a prominent lawyer and lobbyist – to provide testimony in the case.

The dismissal vote failed and the witness vote succeeded on largely party lines, with all 55 Republicans voting against dismissal and for witnesses and 44 out of 45 Democrats opposing witnesses and favouring dismissal.

The fact that the senators have been voting along partisan lines underscores the difficulty the Senate will have in finding the two-thirds margin, or 67 votes, needed to remove Clinton from office.

Ironically, one year into the scandal prompted by Clinton’s evasions about his relationship with Lewinsky, the 45 Senate Democrats seem united and supported by popular opinion. The 55 Republicans led by Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, on the other hand, appear painfully divided and looking for a graceful exit even though they voted as a bloc on Wednesday.

Several Republican senators had openly questioned the need for witness testimony before the Wednesday vote, fearing any measures that could drag out the trial for several weeks more.

Some Republicans may even face political danger over a prolonged trial: 18 Republicans face re-election in polls next year, including 13 from states Clinton won handily when he was re- elected in 1996. In recent days, a few had become increasingly critical of dragging out the trial even though they voted in favour of having Lewinsky, Blumenthal and Jordan testify.

Fearful of their political future at a time when the party controls the Senate and House by relatively narrow margins, Republican leaders nationwide have been urging the senators to find a way out of the impeachment muddle. “We’re all sick of it,” Texas Governor George W. Bush – a potential Republican presidential candidate next year – said this week.

Even former presidential candidate Pat Robertson, one of the main leaders of the Christian right wing, conceded last week that there was no chance of winning the vote to convict Clinton and that the effort should be dropped.

The damage to the conservative party has already been severe. In elections last November, the Republicans – favoured by historical trends to increase their parliamentary strength – actually lost six seats in the House, due at least in part to voter anger over the impeachment process.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich stepped down after the loss, and his designated successor, Representative Bob Livingstone of Louisiana, announced his resignation a month later just as his sexual improprieties were about to be exposed in the media.

The political casualties, therefore, have fallen so far only on the Republicans, caught between voters angry about the effort to oust a popular president and Christian conservatives pushing for Clinton’s removal.

Nor is that picture likely to clear up soon. A CNN-USA Today- Gallup poll this week showed that two-thirds of the public favoured dismissal of the trial, and another two-thirds were opposed to witness testimony. As a result, the Wednesday votes pit the Republicans against the will of the majority, just as last month’s impeachment vote in the House did.

For the past year, Clinton has been consistently supported by two-thirds of respondents in almost every poll, while the approval ratings of the Republican Party have dropped below 30 percent – a level similar to the party’s low standing during the 1972-74 Watergate scandal.

The problem is not restricted to polls. Even Republican supporters are hard put to define what the right-wing party’s agenda is, beyond the removal of Clinton. Two weeks ago, Republican fund-raisers warned that the party had to develop concrete policies or face electoral losses next year.

Yet the impeachment drive lingers on, with a majority of Senate Republicans still angling to find Clinton guilty of impeachable offences as the House Republicans did last month.

The Christian right wing and other conservative voters dominate Republican grassroots activity, and are determined to get rid of Clinton, although the 55 Senate Republicans must win over at least a dozen Democrats to convict the president.

Yet the pressure those forces had exerted pushed impeachment through the House of Representatives even after the party’s poor showing in the November elections and is likely to complicate any resolution of the crisis now.

“A trial, as I understand it, is a search for truth and it should not be trumped by the search for an exit strategy,” Henry Hyde, the chief trial manager among the House Republicans, said on Monday.

In fact, many Senate Republicans seemed clearly worried before the Wednesday votes that an end to the trial without witnesses would make the Republican-dominated House impeachment vote last Dec. 19 appear indefensible and endanger the Republicans’ fate in the House.

But by the same token, the party-line votes that actually took place could make the Senate now seem as bitterly partisan as the House, without guaranteeing that Clinton could ever be convicted.

The irony is that most U.S. presidents who last as long as Clinton – now entering his seventh year in office – are normally politically weak, but the impeachment process has actually seemed to add to his strength.

With only two years left in office, Clinton must deal with a Congress dominated by his political opponents – usually a sign that his last months would be difficult ones.

Instead, the unpopular Republican campaign against him has made Clinton more popular than ever, and has left his opponents divided and preoccupied with impeachment at a time when he alone has taken centre stage on issues like revamping the Social Security pension scheme and bolstering the education system.

It may yet sink, but the trouble-prone Titanic has left a lasting mark on the iceberg.