Mrs. Clinton and the state Democratic Party began running ads last week praising Mrs. Clinton's education proposals and assailing Mr. Lazio's Congressional voting on the issue.

They were trying to redraw the lines so that two of the new districts would be Republican strongholds, two would be Democratic and one a tossup to be decided in next year's Congressional voting.

They suggest that, in the end, the former mayoral candidate with a decidedly freewheeling occupational life style will decide against a pursuit that could leave him tethered to a schedule of Congressional voting and commuting to Washington.

Its taxicabs have a suspect fee structure as gerrymandered as the map of Congressional voting districts.

A recent article in Slate led me to Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, political scientists who use data on Congressional voting to create "maps" of politicians' ideological positions.

However, the Republicans' vastly increased Congressional voting bloc not only afforded them the political power to keep Johnson at bay, it gave the party sufficient votes to attempt impeachment of Johnson, which they did twice, unsuccessfully in 1867 and, finally, successfully in 1868.

A ranking of Congressional voting in 2001 by National Journal placed Mr. Frist among the 10 most conservative Republicans in the Senate.

(This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.)

Whether the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal will have an impact on Congressional voting was open to different conclusions.