FROM THE
FEBRUARY 5, 2001 ISSUE

CONNERLY
A Battle and an Opportunity.

EDITORIAL
Clinton: Enough

t would be perfectly appropriate, strictly as a legal matter, for independent counsel Robert Ray to indict Citizen Clinton. Bill Clinton lied under oath in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment case, compounded the offense by repeating his lies to a federal grand jury, and topped it all off with a healthy helping of witness-tampering and obstruction of justice. Clinton’s own, not particularly energetic Justice Department has pursued dozens of prosecutions for perjury in roughly comparable civil cases. Indeed, Ray, whose office requires him to investigate and prosecute crimes related to the Lewinsky matter, would be hard pressed to justify not indicting Clinton.

An indictment would represent a gratifying comeuppance for Clinton, who is not only remorseless, but actually proud of his fight to defend his Oval Office trysts and subsequent lies (see his Esquire interview — it’s the one with the cover featuring the president’s crotch). But this doesn’t mean indictment would be the right thing, as a matter of process or politics. The trouble isn’t with Ray, but with his office. Conservatives have always opposed the independent counsel as an extra-constitutional excrescence unmoored from any political accountability. This is why Lawrence Walsh could pursue niggling indictments years after the Iran-contra scandal had reached a political resolution through resignations and damage to the Reagan administration. And why Ray may indict Clinton after the political process has already rendered rough justice in the Lewinsky scandal.

Appalling as Clinton’s underlying legal offense was in the scandal, his worst sins were a matter of high politics: that he abused his office, that he lied to the nation, that he was willing to drag the country through so much, for a cause so egotistical and tawdry. The proper punishment for Clinton’s essentially political offense was political — the impeachment process set out by the Constitution. The result of impeachment was, of course, unsatisfactory: a rough public consensus that Clinton was a liar, but that his wrongdoing wasn’t serious enough to warrant his removal from office.

In light of this, an indictment would probably serve only to stoke another pro-Clinton backlash. And to no real end: As a matter of sheer seemliness, the country should be spared the spectacle of a former president in the dock. Meanwhile, Republicans should want to avoid expending any more energy — especially during the crucial early months of the Bush administration — on Clinton. So Bush should pardon Clinton now, for the sake of the integrity of the constitutional process (which does not envisage an independent counsel), for his own practical interests, and for the country. A pardon would make Bush look magnanimous while putting Clinton in his proper place beside Richard Nixon as a disgraced, pardoned former president.

He is a small man, who deserves no more of our attention. It, finally, really is time to move on.