This made sense before and it makes more sense now...
September 30, 1998
Government by Automatic Pilot
By EUGENE J. McCARTHY
WASHINGTON -- Puritans usually wreak more havoc than
sinners. Cromwell did far more damage than any English king.
Reformers did more harm to American cities earlier in this
century than the supposedly corrupt political bosses did. And the postal
system based on patronage worked better than the one that allegedly runs
on "merit."
The independent counsel law both complicates and outweighs Bill Clinton's
sins because it structurally undermines the rule of law and representative
institutions.
Worse, it is part of a long-running trend. It is one of many laws enacted in
the past 30 years that try to elevate government above politics and
therefore criminalize politics, cripple government, or both. The idea is to
inoculate the country against the errors and failings of our leaders by
putting government on automatic pilot.
The assumption behind the independent counsel law is that elections, the
Justice Department, the courts and Congress will all be insufficient to
check whatever corruption exists in the White House.
Similarly, when the House found it necessary to investigate two of its
Speakers, Jim Wright and then Newt Gingrich, it did not trust itself. Even
though the Constitution says that each house of Congress determines its
own rules and punishes its own members, special counsels were deemed
necessary.
The Federal Government in general has become positively prosecutorial.
Unelected magistrates at the Internal Revenue Service and the
Environmental Protection Agency routinely rule on the motives as well as
actions of citizens, with little regard for their legal rights.
This is no-fault politics -- where the buck never stops. In the wake of
Vietnam, Congress passed the War Powers Act, which only muddled the
constitutional waters and blurred the moral and political responsibilities of
both the President and the Senate. Similarly, the 1982 Boland Amendment,
which forbade the Central Intelligence Agency to intervene in Nicaragua,
undermined the President's authority to make foreign policy while
bypassing the advice-and-consent responsibilities of the Senate.
So too with indexing of government salaries and entitlement cost-of-living
adjustments for inflation, a practice Congress embraced 20 years ago.
Relying on an automatic mechanism was easier than making case-by-case
judgments and accepting the political consequences.
We seem to be saying: "Save us from politics and from the responsibility of
choice. Let us trust a magistrate instead." We do not trust our own ability
to lead and judge, or the system the Founders created.
Instead of asserting political control over Social Security, the President and
Congress appointed a "bipartisan" commission to deliver a "solution" -- one
that did not take.
The White House has been no better. Instead of dealing directly with
Congress on taxes and the budget, for example, President Bush
initiated the "budget summit" in 1990. Instead of taking their health
plan to the people, Bill and Hillary Clinton assembled a kitchen cabinet of
experts and delivered their report to the various interest groups.
When a President misbehaves, it is for Congress to discipline him as the
Constitution indicates. The inquiry should begin and end in Congress.
Government by special ministers is not representative government. And
prosecution by special prosecutors is not consistent with the American
idea of due process of law. The fault is not in our constitutional system, or
in ourselves, but in the current disposition to assign all difficult problems in
American government to independent agents and procedures in which no
elected official is held to account. By doing so, we have de-democratized
much of government and criminalized much of politics.
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