I do not like the institution of the special counsel. It is pernicious. It is of dubious constitutionality for all the reasons the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia explicated in his classic Morrison v. Olson dissent. (I say it is “of dubious constitutionality” rather than flatly unconstitutional because the special counsel, as a product of Justice Department regulations, is theoretically less objectionable than the analogous independent-counsel statute at issue in Morrison, which lapsed after the Clinton/Whitewater/Lewinsky scandal.) And in practice, it has proved to be every bit as insidious as Scalia predicted.
Of course, the question is not whether something is good or bad; it’s always good or bad as opposed to what?
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