October 18, 2005
Re: Plamegate Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:40 AM EST On one point John Steele Gordon, in his post yesterday about the Valerie Plame affair, and I are in complete agreement. As Mr. Gordon wryly notes, whatever the outcome of the special grand jury investigating Plamegate, the “Washington punditocracy is throwing out predictions by the ton based on little more than tea-leaf reading.” Well said. I’ve actually stopped following the inside-game coverage. It seems pointless to engage in baseless speculation. Within ten days the grand jury will either indict someone or close up shop. We’ll all find out more at that date. In the meantime, I can handle the suspense. But I part ways with Mr. Gordon in his ultimate assessment of the underlying scandal. He writes, “This is not a hands-in-the-cookie-jar scandal like Teapot Dome, which sent an attorney general to jail. It is not a serious breach-of-national-security scandal like the Pumpkin Papers, which sent Alger Hiss to jail. It is not an old fashioned corruption scandal like the vicuna coat affair that cost Eisenhower’s chief of staff his job. It is not a hanky-panky-in-high-places scandal like Monicagate, which got a President impeached. Instead, it has been basically a scandal about politics as usual.” First, a note about history. Alger Hiss was not jailed for breaching national security. He was convicted of perjury for denying (under oath) that he had handed government documents over to Whittaker Chambers, and for denying (again, under oath) that he had had any contact with Chambers after 1937. Whether he shared classified documents with Soviet agents remains a hotly contested subject on which reasonable people can disagree. Furthermore, Bill Clinton was not impeached for hanky-panky. He was impeached for allegedly committing and suborning perjury. History aside, how does Plamegate not represent a “serious breach of national security?” If someone within the White House leaked the name of an undercover agent–and this, mind you, in the midst of a perpetual war on terror that the Bush White House has invoked time and again to widen executive authority–then we are indeed facing a grave situation. Either we take national security seriously or we don’t. Either it’s illegal to out a covert operative or it’s not. I fail to see the gray area here. I agree with Mr. Gordon that Plamegate represents a sordid case of “politics as usual.” But whereas Mr. Gordon sees the Bush administration as the wronged party–in other words, he argues that the Democrats have cynically criminalized mundane political actions for strategic gain–I’d argue, instead, that the scandal has revealed the dangers of unchecked executive power. Just as in the Nixon administration, which routinely used federal agencies like the FBI and IRS to quell constitutionally protected dissent, high-ranking officials in the Bush administration may have violated federal law and compromised the safety of covert operatives to discredit a political opponent. This isn’t a sin specific to the Republican party; indeed, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations also misused presidential powers to play hardball against their political opponents. It’s more likely a problem of the postwar imperial Presidency. Still, as since 1968 Republicans have controlled the Presidency more often than not, Republicans are by implication more culpable. But Plamegate also lays bare a particular sin of the current Republican regime in Washington. It’s a crisis of due process and democratic procedure. Simply put, the modern-day GOP doesn’t seem to take either very seriously. Earlier this month the House of Representatives extended a routine five-minute vote for almost a half-hour, while party leaders–including the ethically challenged once-and-future majority leader Tom DeLay–browbeat a wavering congressman into changing his vote. (The legislation in question would generously subsidize oil companies.) Such procedural chicanery has become routine in George Bush’s and Tom DeLay’s Washington. Once upon a time, five minutes meant five minutes.
How could it be otherwise? A regime that came to power in part by bending the rules–intimidating minority voters in key Florida precincts; busing in congressional staffers to intimidate ballot counters in Palm Beach county–has taken its disrespect for democratic process to its most logical extreme. In 1999 Bill Clinton faced savage criticism from those in the center and on the left. Many moderates and liberals didn’t believe that his trespasses rose to the level of impeachment, but they were plenty disgusted with the President’s conduct, and they said so. So where’s the outrage today? Conservatives rail about law and order, the war on terror, the evils of moral relativism. Except when it concerns them. In a few days’ time, the special prosecutor may very well exonerate the Bush administration. But then again, he may not. When all the facts are on the table, maybe John Steele Gordon and I will have occasion to revisit this question.
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