The Week

If Paula Jones really wants damages and an apology from Bill Clinton, she’s going about it the wrong way. She should go on a hunger strike.

Much in Washington hinges on semantics. For example, the Racial Justice Act—which demands statistical parity (quotas) in capital sentencing—by its very name allows Senator Carol Moseley Braun to demand, “How can anybody be against racial justice?” Republicans should call this bluff and reject Democrats’ hints that they would be willing to drop some of the bill’s provisions (e.g., applying Racial Justice retroactively to every death-row inmate) in exchange for acquiescence. This act embodies a principle so obnoxious that its faintest whiff should drive Republicans into the principled opposition that persuaded all but five of them to vote against it in the House. The next question will be: Who can possibly oppose a crime bill? But the bill is less a program than a slogan. In the House version, $8 billion goes to social programs from job training to midnight basketball leagues—urban pork. The bill’s vaunted 100,000 new cops are a nice gesture, but since many localities won’t be able to afford these partially funded positions, an empty one. And there are outright monstrosities like the Senate version’s Violence Against Women Act (inspired by Andrea Dworkin), which targets not rapists but judges with unfeminist attitudes. Democrats may call this seizing the crime issue; it looks more like bribing the criminals to take a vacation. Republicans should oppose this Democratic evasion—and, when it passes anyway, hold the Democrats to the test of better crime statistics between now and 1996.

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If Paula Jones really wants damages and an apology from Bill Clinton, she’s going about it the wrong way. She should go on a hunger strike.

Much in Washington hinges on semantics. For example, the Racial Justice Act—which demands statistical parity (quotas) in capital sentencing—by its very name allows Senator Carol Moseley Braun to demand, “How can anybody be against racial justice?” Republicans should call this bluff and reject Democrats’ hints that they would be willing to drop some of the bill’s provisions (e.g., applying Racial Justice retroactively to every death-row inmate) in exchange for acquiescence. This act embodies a principle so obnoxious that its faintest whiff should drive Republicans into the principled opposition that persuaded all but five of them to vote against it in the House. The next question will be: Who can possibly oppose a crime bill? But the bill is less a program than a slogan. In the House version, $8 billion goes to social programs from job training to midnight basketball leagues—urban pork. The bill’s vaunted 100,000 new cops are a nice gesture, but since many localities won’t be able to afford these partially funded positions, an empty one. And there are outright monstrosities like the Senate version’s Violence Against Women Act (inspired by Andrea Dworkin), which targets not rapists but judges with unfeminist attitudes. Democrats may call this seizing the crime issue; it looks more like bribing the criminals to take a vacation. Republicans should oppose this Democratic evasion—and, when it passes anyway, hold the Democrats to the test of better crime statistics between now and 1996.