ON SOCIETY
BY JOHN LEO
9/28/98
It's time for Doomsday
Some diehard Clinton loyalists are talking about a "Doomsday" scenario: If the president is impeached, every important Republican with a skeleton in the closet will be exposed. In fact, this seek-and-destroy impulse has already claimed three members of Congress: Dan Burton, Helen Chenoweth, and Henry Hyde. The Doomsday people went to the trouble of digging up a 1960s affair by Hyde, a very decent and not especially partisan congressman. Expect more of this.
Washington politics now look like a semiorganized vendetta, without rules or restraint. Kenneth Starr's decision to reveal every lurid detail of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was clearly an attempt to humiliate and degrade, not to meet any reasonable expectation of the public's right to know. The Republican decision to release videotapes of President Clinton's testimony is another over-the-top example of vendetta politics. We already know Clinton perjured himself and disgraced his office. Release of the tape is a spiteful act meant to increase anger, not to inform. Enough, already.
"The Death of Outrage" is William Bennett's explanation for the public's muted response to President Clinton's behavior. That's certainly a factor, but so is the widespread opinion that both the president and the political culture that brought him down are out of control.
We are stuck with a berserk attack culture launched in 1987, when Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor to say that if Robert Bork joined the Supreme Court, women would die of botched abortions and blacks could expect to be segregated once again. Clarence Thomas became the most stigmatized American of the 1990s over allegations that he occasionally asked an employee out, talked about X-rated movies, and once joked about a pubic hair on a Coke can.
The Borkings. Since then, a long series of Borkings that now may reach Al Gore have aimed at destroying careers rather than advancing a cause or prosecuting clearly defined crimes. It's a downward spiral. We have reached the point where each attack makes retaliation more likely and deters a great many good candidates from seeking office.
The public's discomfort with the pursuit of Bill Clinton is not simply that "serious charges of perjury and obstruction of justice [were] built on the weak foundation of an almost farcical sex scandal," as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said last week. It's also that special prosecutors are now positioned as semipermanent agents of the attack culture, and tactics that would have raised objections a few years ago are now accepted as routine.
The courts are partly responsible for one of those tactics--blurring the line between what is public and what is private by casually rummaging through people's sex lives. That's why the Paula Jones case, which should never have been brought, led to the Lewinsky scandal. At one point, every woman who ever slept with Clinton must have feared she would be named in public and dragged before a grand jury to testify about the details. In the Jones case, the widow of Larry Lawrence, the ambassador whose body was exhumed from Arlington Cemetery, was subpoenaed and forced to deny rumors of having sex with Clinton. Jeffrey Rosen, legal writer for the New Republic, wrote in February that Starr's efforts to force Secret Service agents and White House aides to testify about Clinton's sexual activity "bring to mind visions, of, well, the Spanish Inquisition."
Among other things, we need a bipartisan effort to reform the independent counsel statute. Two suggestions make sense: Limit inquiries to acts committed while in federal office or during campaigns for federal office, and limit the scope of investigations to high officeholders, perhaps to just the president, vice president, and attorney general. The statute should also be rewritten to take into account Justice Antonin Scalia's objection in Morrison v. Olson (1988) to a key part of the law. That broad language says a special prosecutor must be appointed if an attorney general cannot say there are "no reasonable grounds" for naming one. In effect, this can compel an appointment when nobody thinks it's necessary or even a good idea.
We also need reform of sexual harassment law, that strange offspring of generally radical feminists and a generally conservative Supreme Court. Jones's case against Clinton--that he made a particularly gross pass at her, with no adverse effect when she turned him down--ought to be regarded as too trivial to take to court. Not every crude bit of behavior should qualify for litigation. Oddly, as columnist Cathy Young writes in Reason magazine, feminist hypocrisy over the Paula Jones case is making sensible reform more likely. Abandoning their arguments over Anita Hill, a number of prominent feminists generally dismiss Jones's case by saying no real economic or psychological harm was involved. Since 1993, the law has not required proof of harm in order to prove harassment. But the feminist switch of opinion (however unprincipled) is helping to create a climate for reinstating the old norm and restoring some sanity to harassment law. That change alone would be worth the ordeal of slogging through the endless Jones-Lewinsky-Clinton scandals.