WASHINGTON -- When they rolled Pete Wilson into the chamber Friday morning to cast a crucial budget bill vote, he was repeating a history of devotion to senatorial duty going back 117 years to another one-vote decision.
Wilson, a first term California Republican, was brought by ambulance to the Capitol from Bethesda Naval Medical Center late Thursday night when Senate GOP leader Bob Dole discovered he would need every vote he could get to pass the Republican-backed deficit-reduction measure.
Wilson had emergency surgery for a ruptured appendix Wednesdsay afternoon and had expected to be away from the Senate for seven to 10 days. But when Dole called, Wilson overrode the advice of his doctor, and with tubes still in his arm, was taken to the Capitol.
'He wasn't asked, he offered,' a spokesman said. 'He feels very strongly that a deficit package has to go through.'
Wearing a brown bathrobe and with a tan blanket in his lap, he was wheeled into the Senate about 1:30 a.m. edt, jokingly asked, 'What's the question?' and cast his vote for the bill. With his vote, Dole had a 49-49 tie that Vice President George Bush broke to pass the bill.
Both senators and House members have come from sickbeds and on crutches and in wheelchairs to vote in the past. But the appropriate model for Wilson could have been Sen. James Wilson Grimes, R-Iowa, who was too ill to walk on May 16, 1868, but, according to the Senate Library, nevertheless found a way to cast his vote against conviction in the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson.
A famous lithograph of the time shows Grimes in a chair being carried by two men into the Senate chamber to vote.
Grimes, who was a year older at 52 than Wilson and like him a freshman member, had come to the Senate on the eve of the Civil War and served only one more year after the fateful impeachment trial. But his vote, along with those of 18 other senators, staved off by one vote what would have been the first impeachment conviction of a president.
Wilson spoke with reporters after the vote and said he left the hospital for a simple reason: 'Because this may be the most important vote ofmy career.'
