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Dionne and Shlaes

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from: E.J. Dionne

The Discredited Independent Counsel Law

Posted Tuesday, Feb. 2, 1999, at 9:52 AM ET

Dear Amity,

Nothing in the least nerdy about your worrying about taxes. Most people do.

Ah, the independent counsel law. Everybody has switched sides. Or at least, many Democrats have switched sides and most Republicans say the law is a bad idea but they think it only right and just to apply it to Clinton, etc., etc. Maybe the vast right wing conspiracy was never about Clinton but about discrediting the independent counsel law. A truly successful conspiracy, that.

As for Ralph Nader, he was inspired to action long before Watergate came along, and inspired a lot of people--me included--with issues that had nothing to do with Watergate or Nixon. But to reassure you: I am not now and never have been a lawyer.

I hope we wait a bit before burying the independent counsel. Seems to me there may be a place either for 1) a permanent office inside the Justice Department, operating under a budget, to look into a very carefully defined set of cases where the Attorney General has a clear conflict, or 2) a counsel outside Justice with similarly defined budgets and responsibilities. The idea is that there are some cases where an independent review is useful. Many independent counsels (Joe DiGenova in the Clinton passport files case comes to mind) were successful not because they brought prosecutions, but precisely because they reviewed the evidence and could say with more credibility than a Justice Department official could that a case shouldn't be prosecuted. The big problem (and here critics of the independent counsel make a fair point) is that once a case directly involves the president, charges of being too political will hit the independent counsel or the Justice Department, whoever handles the matter. It is the rare critic of the independent counsel law who praises Janet Reno for declining to name independent counsels in such sensitive cases as the one involving Harold Ickes. Surely she has taken the path of most resistance. I'd like her to speak out publicly some day about why she named so many counsels in the early Clinton years and fewer later. She should be the first witness when the independent counsel law comes up for renewal.

Of course you have to wonder: Couldn't the Clinton case have been handled differently, and in a way that didn't give rise to what we're facing now? No, no, we won't settle that here. We'll be arguing about that for a decade or more.

As for three kids: Don't knock our colleagues. The data show that most Americans these days stop at two. So most journalists are more in the mainstream than thee or I. Fortunately, these are not matters that people take polls on before making their decisions. Or at least I hope they don't.

Best, EJ

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011
from: E.J. Dionne

The Discredited Independent Counsel Law

Posted Tuesday, Feb. 2, 1999, at 9:52 AM ET
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E.J. Dionne is a columnist at the Washington Post and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Amity Shlaes, the author of The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What To Do About It, is a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
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