Their policy duties are confined to zoning issues like setting boundaries for schools in the district and easing overcrowding.

But he has grown to relish his foreign policy duties, aides say, and no longer feels the need to rely on more experienced mentors in his decision-making.

The State Duma retained broad responsibility for adopting laws on foreign policy, but the constitution stipulated no specific foreign policy duties for the legislative branch.

She is not considered a foreign policy specialist, and some here in Bonn said her appointment might mean that the Chancellor planned to assume more foreign policy duties.

Ellen Baer, the influential Dinkins administration official who has been embroiled in a controversy over the selection of a scandal-tainted company to collect parking fines, was suspended from her most sensitive policy duties last night.

Mr. Rove was relieved of his day-to-day domestic policy duties at the White House in a staff shake-up last week, but White House officials say the change was unrelated to his legal complications.

Several Republican senators said Mr. Lott would be offered the chairmanship of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee next week, a position with few policy duties but one with significant jurisdiction over the organization of the Senate.

In the Senate, he said, Mr. Schumer could at once fill the constituent-service role that Mr. D'Amato has traditionally played in New York - which has earned him the nickname "Senator Pothole" - and perform the grander policy duties normally associated with senators.

A graduate of The Citadel, the South Carolina military college, and a veteran of the Persian Gulf war, Mr. Buyer argued that Mr. Clinton's "diminished veracity" had had an "inherently corrosive" effect on his capacity to function effectively as commander-in-chief and to carry out his foreign policy duties.