Read All About It
Two vans! 36 boxes! Hundreds of pages! Starr handed his report off to Congress this afternoon, as Capitol Hill police officers loaded dozens of white boxes into their vehicles to keep them under lock and key-at least for the moment. The House leadership is still negotiating how to handle the report. Following their meeting this morning, it now appears that Speaker Gingrich and Minority Leader Dick Gephardt agree that the Starr report should be made available to all Members and the public as soon as possible. This is good news. Trying to keep a report secret would be a fool's task that would inevitably create leaks, and distracting stories and arguments about who is responsible for them. (In fact, we might see leaks very soon, as even cops and FBI officers like to talk.) Making the report public will allow Congress to focus on its substance--a prospect that the White House surely can't relish.

Previously, the Judiciary Committee had been planning only to make public an executive summary to the report. But it's now not clear that there is an executive summary. Republicans have been talking about one for weeks, in hopes that Starr will take the hint. But early reports say the report has a 25-page "introduction," which could just be legal throat-clearing. Starr may very well want to avoid characterizing the evidence, which is what writing an executive summary would entail. All this is probably less important now that both Democrats and Republicans seem to want the full report public. It only means that the interpretation of the presumably voluminous report will perhaps be a little more dependent on what the media decides to focus on.

Disagreements between Republicans and Democrats remain about other procedures for handling the report. They have yet to decide some basic ground rules, such as what kind of subpoena power to grant the Judiciary Committee minority. Republicans are naturally resistant to giving ranking minority member Rep. John Conyers unilateral subpoena power, given his erratic behavior and irresponsible comments about Starr over the last seven months. If Republicans and Democrats can't agree on a resolution laying out all these rules, the report will eventually be available to all 435 members of Congress--no big loss. Starr's proceedings have been secret long enough--it's time to read all about it.

You Read It Here First
We hate to say we told you so, but why the heck not? As far as we can tell, last week we were the first folks to say the Starr report was likely to come to Congress this week (as it just did). While we're touting ourselves, we may as well point out that we predicted the Clinton testimony of August 17th (admit to something improper, refuse to answer questions about details) the very day it was announced he would testify.

The Kendall Letter, II
Are we the only ones who find it odd that the President's lawyer is the one now making Watergate analogies?

Preferences in Black and Whitewash
Derek Bok and William G. Bowen have just come out with a book, The Shape of the River, defending the racially discriminatory practices in which they engaged as the presidents, respectively, of Harvard and Princeton. Judging from the New York Times's half-page press release by Ethan Bronner today, their study, "[w]ith its rich database and carefully calibrated tone," will become the lead exhibit in the case for racial preferences in college admissions. Indeed, the authors say their study of graduates from 28 elite colleges "should put to rest major objections to such policies." No wonder preference supporters want to shut down debate if this is the best they can do: based on the Times report, the study proves almost nothing.

The study, in fact, says that blacks admitted to universities which use preferences have lower grades and graduation rates than most students--which is more than many institutions of higher learning, including Princeton, were willing to say before the passage of Proposition 209. "But after graduation," the Times-man continues, "the survey found, these students achieve notable successes." Tough luck for the kids who don't reach graduation, having had years cruelly stolen from them which they could have used successfully attending schools to which they were more suited.

"Blacks graduating from elite colleges earned 70 per cent to 85 per cent more than did black graduates generally," according to B&B. Well, duh. Nobody denies that black students at Yale will tend to be smarter than black students at Michigan State, and that graduates of the first will tend to be more economically successful afterward. The question is, how do blacks attending Yale because of preferences--as opposed to those who would have gotten in anyway without them--fare compared to blacks who passed up preferences to go to a less selective school? One very rough-and-ready test would be to control for SAT scores and high school grade-point averages when comparing graduates from different institutions. To aggregate black students as B&B do, without regard to any measures of merit, obscures more than it reveals.

It gets worse when B&B turn philosophical. Racial preferences for college admissions are like handicapped parking spots, they argue, quoting Thomas J. Kane: "The sight of the open space will frustrate many passing motorists who are looking for a space," even though only one could have gotten it were it not reserved. It's true that preferences will create grievances among people it doesn't even harm. (It will also create harms among people who don't know they have a grievance.) But this is just another way that preferences are poisonous for race relations.

The summary of B&B continues: "Like handicapped parking spaces, they say, race-conscious admission policies have a major impact on the minority in question whereas eliminating them would only marginally help members of the majority." This argument will be persuasive only if one already thinks in terms of racial categories. The individual denied admission because of preferences is unlikely to take comfort in the insignificance of this setback to whites in general.