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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (33818)	2/12/1999 12:04:00 PM
From: Zoltan!	Respond to of 67261

February 12, 1999 Review & Outlook The Sword of Justice The Justice Department is the San Andreas fault of the Clinton Administration, quaking for example with Janet Reno's appointment as the third woman after Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, the summary firing of 93 U.S. Attorneys, the installation of Webster Hubbell as Associate Attorney General, Ms. Reno's reappointment after a woodshed chat with the President, and the rejection of the Louis Freeh and Charles La Bella recommendations for an independent counsel for campaign finance. Now Mr. Clinton, equipped with a get-out-of-jail-free card from the U.S. Senate, is on the brink of turning Justice from his shield into his sword. That is the clear meaning of the departmental investigation of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's handling of Monica Lewinsky. Ms. Reno is point person for an attack intended to delegitimize the impeachment, Mr. Starr and the Lewinsky issue. The notion is that if Mr. Starr violated some Marquess of Queensberry rule, then there was no obstruction, there was no perjury, there was no blue dress, there was no sexual contact and there was no Monica Lewinsky. The argument, now accepted sotto voce by various pundits, is that it was an injustice that lies and obstruction were not allowed to succeed. Ms. Reno is lending her Justice Department to this effort despite deep questions about her jurisdiction to do so. Thursday the Landmark Legal Foundation filed papers with the Special Division supervising independent counsel, asking that the three-judge panel block her investigation. The Division has the powers "to assure that the independent counsel has adequate authority to fully investigate and prosecute" matters within his writ, but Justice says the Attorney General can investigate under her power to fire an independent counsel "for good cause." The basic point is that it's preposterous that Ms. Reno is investigating the man who is investigating her own boss. This of course has not stopped Ms. Reno before. She turned down the Freeh-La Bella recommendations of a campaign-finance independent counsel, overruling the views of the director of the FBI and her own handpicked head of that investigation. She successively cleared the President, the Vice President, vice presidential buddy Peter Knight and former White House factotum Harold Ickes. In each case she relied on judgments that belong in the hands of an independent counsel under a law that, whatever its problems, was passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton. Predictably, this has had a devastating impact on veteran prosecutors and FBI agents who thought their agencies stood above politics. While a couple of trophy indictments are expected soon, the campaign-finance task force is preparing to disband and send staff members back to their original offices. David Vicinanzo, Mr. La Bella's successor, is said to be preparing to return to his job as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in New Hampshire. Any pockets of principle left within Justice have also just received a stark warning in Mr. La Bella's fate. He left campaign finance for an appointment as interim U.S. Attorney in San Diego. But last August he was suddenly passed over for the permanent assignment. California Senator and Presidential in-law Barbara Boxer recommended career prosecutor Gregory Vega instead. Mr. Vega's nomination was never submitted to the Senate, and Mr. La Bella continued in the interim position. But, according to Mr. La Bella's account in the Los Angeles Times, Ms. Reno and Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder told him they were planning to take the extraordinary step of petitioning a federal court to replace him as interim U.S. Attorney with Mr. Vega. He said, "Obviously, I did not have the confidence of the attorney general and the deputy attorney general and so I think it's time to move on." So last week he resigned, closing out a 16-year career as a Federal prosecutor. The rule of law, Chairman Hyde kept repeating, was at stake in the impeachment proceedings. But it is not merely a matter of personal perjury, it is an ongoing effort to politicize the enforcement of Justice. It cries out for Congressional oversight of the most vigorous sort. And the Judicial branch, undermined by attacks on officers of the court such as Mr. Starr, also needs to defend itself. The get-out-of-jail-free card may even inspire Mr. Clinton to have Ms. Reno actually fire Mr. Starr. At least until the Independent Counsel Act expires in June, however, a replacement would be named by the Special Division. Mr. La Bella is available. http:/wsj.com

To: one_less who wrote (33818)	2/12/1999 12:13:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 67261

I'd say it indicates our culture has problems, brees. For what I think in more detail, I'd refer you to www2.techstocks.com, what was supposed to be my final post to Neocon. Particularly this little quote from "stupid man" Anthony Lewis. The authors do not offer easy remedies, and I do not suppose there are any. But the more Americans read and understand this wise book, the healthier our political society will be. We might become less cynical about politics. We might be less susceptible to political quackery about the evil of the United States Government. (http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/970803.03lewist.html) The book Lewis was reviewing was NEW FEDERALIST PAPERS: Essays in Defense of the Constitution. By Alan Brinkley, Nelson W. Polsby and Kathleen M. Sullivan. Brinkley was the author of the Sunday NYT op-ed on what historians might make of Starr, that I've posted several times. I haven't seen the legion of Clinton hater take on Brinkley's view, though I've probably hopelessly tarred Brinkley with guilt by association. Next up: Lawrence Tribe, from today's NYT. Another stupid man, no doubt, a constitutional law guy who's too stupid to understand the deep legal knowledge exhibited by the Clinton haters here. Who needs this "innocent till proven guilty" crap, when "truth and justice" and "rule of law" is all you care about. Clinton is Capone, or the antichrist, whatever it takes to bring him down is justified.

To: one_less who wrote (33818)	2/12/1999 12:19:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

And the Winner Is nytimes.com As promised, Laurence Tribe on the impeachment process. He's pretty widely known, but I'm sure easily dismissed as a "stupid man" like Anthony Lewis, by the legal "scholars" around here. Make of it what you will. This is the full article, quoted without comment. By LAURENCE H. TRIBE CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- When it ends today with President Clinton's widely anticipated acquittal, the impeachment drama will have yielded few heroes -- except the Constitution's Framers, whose wisdom that drama will again have vindicated. As the nation learned in a yearlong civics lesson, the Constitution, in this area as in others, provides broad principles, not paint-by-the-numbers instructions, guiding but not resolving the debate over issues like the meaning of "high crimes and misdemeanors." That different audiences drew competing inferences from the Framers' words was exactly as they might have wished. Among the most basic of the constitutional inferences this impeachment process will have reinforced is that consensual private intimacies, even when they have secondary public dimensions, fall uneasily if at all within the Government's powers to investigate or to punish. That the impeachment process ultimately will have treated the cover-up of a sexual affair -- even between the President and a young White House intern, and even extending into the judicial process -- as very different from the cover-up of, say, a break-in aimed at the President's political opponents reinforces the constitutionally special status of the private sphere. And that it was the people rather than our elected representatives who grasped that distinction earliest and held onto it most tenaciously has been a crucial reaffirmation of the constitutional truth proclaimed at Gettysburg -- that ours is indeed a government of, by and for the people. Unless the rights of individuals or minority groups are threatened, our governing institutions are structured to make the sustained will of a significant majority all but impossible to topple -- as the failure of the effort to remove President Clinton will dramatically illustrate. Many who have urged the President's removal have been willing to see him remain in power if only he would confess that he committed a crime -- strongly suggesting that no danger to individual rights or to the constitutional system itself was perceived in the President's admittedly shameful behavior. This impeachment has been less about danger to the nation than about disgust with the President's attitude. Failure to convict and remove him will reaffirm the limited role the Constitution gave the impeachment mechanism: to shield the nation against rogue Presidents, not to punish Presidents who are rogues. Crucial to that rightly confined role is the two-thirds vote required for conviction. That requirement would have been effectively scuttled if plans had materialized for a majority vote finding that the President lied under oath and obstructed justice, or convicting him but declining to remove him. The Constitution dodged a bullet when those efforts collapsed. It dodged another when Senators resisted efforts by White House counsel to rest the distinction between this case and cases of judges removed for perjury on the shaky ground that judges alone may be removed for bad behavior short of high crimes and misdemeanors. Embracing the theory that judges ought to be relatively easy to remove would have endangered the independent judiciary and thus the entire Constitution. And no such theory was needed to see that conduct making a judge who sits for life dangerous to the republic need not have that significance in a President who serves a four-year term. At the same time, the Senate's rejection of the most exotic or technical grounds for dismissing the impeachment articles -- the fact that they were approved by a lame-duck House, for instance, and the fact that they were poorly drafted -- vindicated the Framers' wisdom in making the process more political than legal, for even a nation desperate to see this tawdry tale end might have found a trick ending too tough to take. Perhaps the deadliest bullet the Constitution will dodge if the Senate acquits is that of impeachment wielded, however sincerely, as a purely partisan tool rather than as a political device for giving voice to a bipartisan consensus that an official is too dangerous to leave in office. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, in his book "Grand Inquests," stressed how vital it was for the independence of the judiciary and for the strength of the Presidency that Justice Samuel Chase in 1805 and President Andrew Johnson in 1868 were acquitted by the Senate after highly partisan impeachments by the House. Similarly, the acquittal of Mr. Clinton will allow us to take comfort that the Presidency escaped becoming dangerously dependent on a Congress controlled by the opposite party. The Senate will once again have affirmed the success of the Constitution's design. Beyond the danger of Congressional dominance over the other two branches was the risk that promiscuous and partisan use of the impeachment technique would leave it too tarnished to serve as a check against real abuses of judicial or executive power. The happy irony is that the origins of the Clinton impeachment -- in the zeal of an independent counsel whose office should have been held unconstitutional years ago, in the Supreme Court's dubious decision to permit a civil suit to proceed against a sitting President, in a partisan commitment to topple a President who embodies all that many conservatives detest about the culture and values of the 1960's -- may well provide grounds to view this impeachment as an aberration. That will prevent impeachment itself from falling into general disrepute. A lthough some will continue to condemn an acquittal of this President as proof that no Constitution, however brilliantly conceived, can protect us from our own moral weakness, I believe history is more likely to view it as a verdict that kept the Constitution's processes of impeachment and removal intact so that they might serve their crucial mission if and when we face a genuine threat of tyranny. Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, is the author of the forthcoming third edition of ''American Constitutional Law.''