It was unrelieved tedium as Republican floor managers flogged the same arguments they have made over and over again to prove that the President committed perjury and obstructed justice to cover up his affair with the intern.

No new ground was broken, and as the proceedings droned on hour after hour, it became apparent that the House Republicans were merely trying to buttress before the Senate the case they have already made, a case which has been largely rejected by the American people.

The dullness was compounded by the rules which restricted the normally voluble Senators to total silence. The 100-member Senate, which constitutes the jury, listened in grimly as legislators from the other chamber began their 24-hour opening salvo.

White House lawyers will get torespond with a 24-hour defence beginning Tuesday. While it was boring enough in the soporific Senate chambers, even television struggled to put life into the proceedings.

Thanks to the new rules, cameras could only focus on the floor managers making the case with no cuts to the Senate benches.

Major networks, which began covering the historic proceedings, tried to enliven the telecast with cut in commentaries, blurbs, and graphics, but soon gave up and returned to regular programming. Only the cable networks stayed with the Senate. Early indications were that fewer than 20 per cent of Americans watched the proceedings that put their President on trial.

Almost everywhere, it was business as usual. Clinton himself did not watch the opening and tried to project the business-as-usual routine, attending a law and order conference on Thursday and opening a meeting in reinventing government on Friday morning.

He later had lunch with vice-president Al Gore and worked on his State of the Union speech slatedfor Tuesday, the White House said.

First Lady Hillary Clinton too ignored the proceedings and went to the National Air and Space museum to inaugurate the Mars Millennium Project through which schoolchildren will develop plans for how a colony on the red planet would function.