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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (17610)	7/28/1998 12:04:00 PM
From: Zoltan!	Respond to of 20981

July 28, 1998 The President's Subpoena Throughout the five years of his Presidency, Bill Clinton has received high marks from every precinct for one skill: spin. The reality of any objective event, a Filegate, is taken by the President or his agents and "spun" into a kind of post-reality consensus favorable or non-threatening to the Presidency. There is even now a book about it titled "Spin Cycle." But on every washing machine ever built there's one inexorable reality about the spin cycle: it stops. Kenneth Starr's subpoena to a sitting President suggests that after five years, the spin cycle is starting to slow. The first, strong sign came on Thursday a fortnight ago, when the full panel of the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia turned away the President's claim of a protective-privilege function for his Secret Service detail. The panel's decision pointedly said none of its members was interested in hearing the government's argument. Then on Friday an appeal to the Chief Justice also fell flat, with Justice Rehnquist saying he doubted the White House would prevail before the full Supreme Court. Yesterday, a D.C. Circuit Court panel ruled 2-1 that top aide Bruce Lindsey is not entitled to claim lawyer-client privilege on his conversations with the President. And yesterday Monica Lewinsky herself spent the day with Starr prosecutors. The truth is, Bill Clinton has finally spun himself into a place where spin does not exist. Federal courts aren't perfect places; they can play politics and yes, they often "make" laws. But it is beginning to dawn on the political community that Mr. Starr's subpoena to the President--indeed the whole of his clash with the Presidency--has risen to a realm of unavoidably austere issues of constitutionality and the rule of law. If you're a Democrat, the President's timing couldn't be worse. This is all happening within whistling distance of two events: a national election to form a new Congress and the presentation of Mr. Starr's full report to the current Congress. That is, the Democratic Party, already scratching to prevent slippage in its Congressional membership, must now face the prospect of loading the Clinton Presidency onto the donkey cart and hauling the whole legal morass forward to November. Will they bear this load? Maybe--but maybe not. The Starr subpoena is forcing Democrats toward the one choice they'd always hoped to avoid: They have to choose whether to go the distance with Bill Clinton, or get off before November. Insofar as getting off is difficult, the next-best choice is to make sure that if Mr. Clinton is along for the ride, he at least remains presentable in public. Comments from prominent Democrats this past weekend made it clear that the behavior of the nation's highest legal officer is much on their minds. House minority leader and bellwether Dick Gephardt said: "I have always believed that Bill Clinton would do as he said he would do. He would get all the necessary information to the Independent Counsel." Senator Joe Lieberman suggested, "I think he's got to talk to the prosecutors and the grand jury, so it's not even a choice in the end." Our reading of these events is that the Democratic Party elders have begun to see what the White House may never see--that what worked till now has become, all of a sudden, indefensible. Mr. Clinton himself signed the reauthorization of the Independent Counsel law, and it is the clear language of this law that the President is a covered person. In other words, whether or not a President can be summoned by the Podunk DA, Mr. Clinton's own pen gave a special position to subpoenas from Mr. Starr's office. The President may choose again to order his lawyers to further fight, litigate and delay the Independent Counsel's subpoena. It is not so clear what he might order his spinners to do about resulting court rebuffs stretching from here to November. The arguments now are strictly about accountability, in the courts and at the polls. interactive.wsj.com Let's see if Clinton appeals to the Supremes. No doubt they will kick him in the head again in short order.