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Former GOP senator from Missouri and, later, United Nations ambassador John C. Danforth is now leading a political campaign to retake the Republican Party from the religious right. Danforth, an ordained Episcopalian priest, is an advocate of stem-cell research. He supports the rights of gays and lesbians to marry. Danforth was also Thomas Clarence's chief Senate sponsor.

''Do not panic,'' Mr. Danforth shouted as he concluded, chastising the Senate for acting in haste. ''Do not panic,'' he repeated, as he slapped his desk again. ''They go to basic values,'' he added. ''They are questions that should be answered in a legislative arena. They go beyond the experts. They go to national commitments. They go to values and resources.'' Senator Lowell P. Weicker Jr., the Connecticut Republican who has led the fight over the last several years for money for AIDS research, said, ''I think [Jack Danforth] raises legitimate questions in the sense of coming from a lack of knowledge that would probably apply to 90 percent of the other guys on the floor,'' adding, ''From that perspective I do not think he was trying to stall.'' ''Our tendency in the Senate is to focus on today's issue, today's news,'' Mr. Danforth said. ''Every tendency here is to put off the big questions and deal with what is at hand. We'll do it like we did the drug bill last year. Pass a bill and put out our statements of how we solved the drug problem.'' Concern About Haste

In a sharply worded speech delivered at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, the Senator said Japan's trade practices were antagonizing countries around the world, and he warned that only action to reduce Japan's trade surpluses could avert a breakdown of free trade.

Senators Bob Kerrey and John C. Danforth volunteered to deliver the unpleasant news, agreeing last year to head a group of assembled worthies called the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform. The idea, a concession to Mr. Kerrey on the eve of the vote on President Clinton's deficit-reduction package, was to sound a very public warning long before Washington faced the choice of breaking promises to tens of millions of retirees, taxing the socks off wage earners or abandoning the pretense of controlling the deficit. With deja-voodoo economics ascendant in the new Congress, Washington can no longer even summon the interest to shoot the messengers. \"I'm afraid we are oscillating around a decidedly downward trend,\" lamented Henry Aaron, an economist with the Brookings Institution. It is a trend in which politicians find it ever more difficult to deny immediate gratification to the electorate. Last but hardly least, suggests Robert Reischauer, the head of the Congressional Budget Office, the plan demands crisis-style sacrifice in the absence of a crisis. \"Entitlements don't explode,\" he noted, \"the budget deteriorates gradually.\" And that leaves policy makers without a convenient moment to rise above interest-group politics in the name of the greater good. The only real whack ever taken at Social Security came a decade ago, when Congress hid behind the big white lie that the system was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Contrary to the Senator's assertions, People for the American Way has not contacted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (or anyone else) seeking \"dirt\" on [Clarence Thomas]. When Senator [John C. Danforth] first made his assertion, we immediately contacted his office to set the record straight and ask that he correct his error.