The Weekly Standard

NO ACCOUNT OF A RULING by a federal judge these days is complete without a note on whether the judge was a Democratic or Republican appointee. Why is that? In theory, we should have judicial decisions that apply the law, not rulings based on the personal political preferences of judges. In practice, however, no one is terribly surprised when a ruling favorable to the GOP cause comes from a Republican-appointed judge or when a Democratic appointee comes up with a conclusion favorable to Democrats.

How cynical a view is this? Are the black robes really just camouflage for the indelible stamp of party affiliation guiding each judge’s decisions? That seems overwrought. From time to time you do run across a left-leaning outcome from a Republican appointee or a right-leaning outcome from a Democratic appointee. And even in cases where results conform to cynical expectations, one must not lose sight of the fact that Republican appointees tend to differ from Democratic appointees in their theories of jurisprudence.

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WHAT A MAGICAL SHAPE-CHANGING BEAST this independent-counsel law is! In its marauding two-decade-long journey through the American political landscape, it has revealed aspects of itself we poor peasants could never have imagined. Republicans and now Democrats have felt the fury of the creature, its quasi-immortality, its voraciousness, its single-mindedness in pursuit of its prey. But now, for the first time, it has given birth — to impeachment proceedings against the president in the House of Representatives. And only now are we learning of the peculiar sway it has on the minds of men. Republicans, perhaps mesmerized, came to believe that they could tame it, or at least let it do their work for them. But whether it serves them or they are its captives is an open question.

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As WASHINGTON GEARS UP for the arrival in the House of Representatives of Kenneth Starr’s report on President Clinton’s impeachable offenses, a particularly virulent strain of wannabe conventional wisdom has been making the rounds. It is that Republicans would prefer (if they put party ahead of country) to keep a weakened Clinton in office for two more years — because an incumbent President Gore running in the 2000 presidential race gives them the heebie-jeebies.

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NO GOOD MORALITY TALE is complete these days without a wallow in the slough of victimhood, and the Monica Lewinsky affair is no exception. Those laying claim to the mantle of victim are many, ranging from President Clinton (in his blast against independent counsel Kenneth Starr when he was supposed to be apologizing) to Monica herself (who at last report was miffed that the Big He didn’t have so much as a kind word for her). As the week of The Speech unfolded, though, the emerging consensus of official Washington was that the true victims were the poor souls whom Bill Clinton had callously and calculatingly sent out for seven months to do his lying for him: the loyal aides and allies who had taken him at his word.

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From Yugoslavia to Dayton, Ohio.

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The turning point for Bosnia came in August 1995 with a NATO bombing campaign. The air strikes succeeded in doing what no diplomatic effort had: persuading Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to join in ending the four-year-old war over the pieces of the former Yugoslavia. Before the bombing, the aggressors in Bosnia treated international efforts with contempt, even taking hostages from the ineffectual U.N. peacekeeping force. But barely three months after the strikes began, a comprehensive peace agreement was reached at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

The decision to bomb for peace was controversial, to put it mildly. Most European governments found it unattractive and risky, as did NATO, the American military, and the major international organizations. Yet they were all equally mindful of the failure of diplomacy in Bosnia — and its horrible consequences in lost lives, ethnic cleansing and refugees. What to do?

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INDEPENDENT COUNSEL KENNETH STARR believes that, constitutionally, his office cannot indict the president of the United States. What, then, of the evidence the prosecutor is assembling suggesting that Bill Clinton may have lied under oath, urged others to do the same, rewarded them for doing so, and generally obstructed justice in an effort to limit the collateral damage from Paula Jones’s charges of sexual misconduct? The short answer is that Starr will refer any such evidence to the House Judiciary Committee, which would decide whether the information warranted impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” If the House votes to impeach, the Senate then tries the case.

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REPUBLICANS EAGERLY DECLARED that they weren’t surprised by Attorney General Janet Reno’s decision last week not to seek an independent counsel in the Democratic fund-raising scandal. It’s hard to find anyone in the GOP who doesn’t think the fix is in — that the Justice Department and Reno are twisting themselves and the law into pretzels to avoid siccing an independent counsel on Bill Clinton or Al Gore.

Republicans are fond of citing Reno’s own 1993 congressional testimony on the independent-counsel statute. At that time, the attorney general noted an “inherent conflict whenever senior executive branch officials are to be investigated” by the Justice Department. An independent-counsel investigation ensures the appearance of fairness, she said then. And exoneration by an independent prosecutor, should that be the result of the investigation, is more credible than exoneration by an official of the same administration.

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