One Man’s Justice is Another Man’s Distraction
The right is bad-mouthing special prosecutors in the wake of the Scooter Libby ruling. As example, they drag out the corpse of Bill Clinton’s saga to compare unfavorably against Scooter.
We obviously cannot know whether the feckless Clinton would have acted more vigorously abroad had he not gone to sleep every night that year thinking about how to escape from the legal consequences of his own tawdry conduct and lies, and been thinking instead about how to protect the country from its enemies.
The assumption is that outing a covert operator who went on record against administration policy is in protection of our fragile, beleaguered nation.
But that’s the warm-up. Then they invoke the fear response.
Now, unlike in the 1990’s, we are at war.
A war of our own making. Funny how that detail is overlooked. The meat of the article is how rogue prosecutors should be under the authority of the executive branch.
To begin with, both cases featured the familiar phenomenon of runaway special counsels. Although the independent-counsel statute under which Clinton was endlessly investigated and ended in his impeachment has expired, it was a recipe for mischief. By vesting executive authority in a prosecutor not subject to the control of the executive branch, Congress had created a constitutional anomaly, one with unintended and destructive effects that plagued Democratic and Republican administrations alike. True, Fitzgerald’s appointment was the result of Attorney General John Ashcroft’s self-recusal, and he was endowed with a different set of powers from those granted to Kenneth Starr, but he operated every bit like a one-case prosecutor, effectively unchecked by line-authority in the executive branch.
It amazes me how some Americans believe that Authoritarianism is an appropriate modality for a modern Democratic Republic. Give it another quarter-century and the children of these people would vote for totalitarianism. The irony is how that would be the last free choice they would ever make. Three words apply: Checks and Balances.
Here’s another slice of steak:
In retrospect, it is clear that the Clinton case, despite the President’s obviously perjured statements, should not have been permitted to move forward. Indeed, as Posner has also argued, the Supreme Court erred grievously when it ruled in 1997, unanimously, to allow a sitting President to be caught up in civil litigation involving sex.
20-20 hindsight. To say "We shouldn’t have" cannot excuse the fact that you did. Ask any parent of a hung-over teenager the morning after prom. The Clinton "scandal" was a political firing squad whose only purpose was to hijack the American government. It worked. But while the Republican congress feasted on the sanctity of presidential impeachment proceedings, devaluing the institution in the process, Americans like you and me were losing health care, education funding, social security benefits and jobs. But that wasn’t important at the time, nor has it been important since.
Back to Poor Scooter:
We do not yet know what the price tag will be for the Libby distraction, just as we do not know if his conviction will be tossed out on appeal or result in a presidential pardon.
So, one man’s justice is another man’s distraction - interesting. Bill Clinton’s sexual discretion was a crime of magnitude wherein he put the nation at greater risk of terrorists and killed thousands of soldiers and half a million foreign nationalists all the while bankrupting the nation through deceit, mismanagement, graft, and profiteering. Scooter Libby, by contrast, just lied to protect a vice president that had trouble keeping his Johnson zipped up.
Wait - did I get that backward?