OH, BEHAVE.(Congressman James Traficant's final floor statements)(Brief Article)

Last Thursday, when the phone rang in the Washington office of the by then former Congressman James Traficant, the only greeting was a singsong intern's voice saying, "Seventeenth District of Ohio." The Congressman's name and title had been banished from both phone and door, along with the Congressman himself, following his conviction on ten felony counts of bribery, tax evasion, and racketeering, and, subsequently, his solemn expulsion from the House by his peers. But, try as his colleagues might to forget him, a few die-hard fans of adolescent antics, polyester suits, and shag hairdos were still savoring Traficant as Capitol Hill's answer to Austin Powers.

"I'll miss him, I really will," said Tony Blankley, the editorial-page editor of the Washington Times, who once served as the spokesman for the former Speaker Newt Gingrich. "Traficant's floor statements were wonderfully uninhibited. He said things that most politicians won't say, things that always rang true on some human level." Blankley suggested that Traficant, crooked or not, provided comic relief, somewhat in the tradition of Falstaff. "He wasn't a clown; he was a court jester in the real sense of being the person who can tell the truth to the king."

The final soliloquy that the Congressman delivered last week as he tried to persuade his colleagues to let him continue serving was many things--self-pitying, rambling, occasionally scatological--but it was hardly Shakespearean. He promised that he was "going to get right to the point," but then he veered into a story about "a small army of patriots . . . facing a gigantic army armed to the teeth." He continued, "And the captain, trying to show strength, calls his assistant: 'Go to the tent and get my bright-red vest. . . . The blood will not be seen because of my bright-red vest.' " He explained that the captain "ran out into the battle and was destroyed. His assistant came up, and he called his attendant. He said, 'Go to the tent and get me those dark-brown pants.' " In case this point was lost, the Congressman then added, gleefully, "Think about it! Tonight I have dark-brown pants on!"

Evidently enjoying the immunity from libel and slander that reigns on the House floor, Traficant went on to accuse an F.B.I. agent, by name, of raping one of his constituents, and to call the former Attorney General Janet Reno "a traitor." He contended that his prosecution stemmed from a Justice Department vendetta that dated back to his remarkable success at beating earlier charges. (This prompted Representative Howard Berman to point out that, if ...