June 15, 2007
Amnesty Now and Then II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:20 AM EST I think Joshua Zeitz’s linkage between a pardon for Richard Nixon and a pardon for Scooter Libby, and between some form of what I will call amnesty (even though the term is inaccurate—but life is short) for draft dodgers then and illegal aliens now, is a bit strained. First, I agree that the Ford proposal for ending the legal problems of draft evaders is an excellent historical analogy for the proposal to end the legal problems of currently illegal aliens. Ford’s proposal and the proposal in the immigration bill were the only real, practical solutions to the two problems. We couldn’t jail 100,000 otherwise law-abiding young men then or expel 12 million workers now. But I do not think it correct to say that Bush has given only lukewarm support to the immigration bill. He was up on Capitol Hill this week lobbying GOP senators, a very unusual thing for a president to do and a clear sign that he means business and is willing to spend his fast-dwindling store of political capital on it. His rhetoric on the bill has been unusually strong as well. I’m not sure what more he can do. If you want villains here, I nominate Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his political Svengali, Senator Chuck Schumer. Both are far more interested in political advantage than in solving the nation’s problems. If the country’s immigration problems have to continue to fester so that these two can deny an achievement to President Bush, so be it. Reid yanked the bill off the floor, despite the pleas of such not-exactly-Bush-allies as Senator Ted Kennedy, called it the President’s bill, which it is not (it was written by Senators McCain and Kennedy), and claimed that the President had failed again. There’s a reason Senator Reid’s approval ratings are even lower than the President’s: he’s widely perceived as being a partisan first and a senator second. He’s the sort of politician who gives politics a bad name. He doesn’t even seem to be very adept at it. But I don’t see any correspondence between Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon and Bush’s possible pardon of Scooter Libby. Ford pardoned Nixon for raisons d’état, to get Watergate over and done with so the country could face the many very serious problems of the dismal 1970s. And he did it despite the fact that it was bound to hurt him politically, which it did, badly. It was, therefore, a genuine profile in courage, one that has been vindicated by time, now that the passions of thirty years ago have died down. Any Bush pardon of Libby, however, would not be for the good of the country. One more Washington insider in the hoosegow would be only a personal tragedy for Scooter Libby. In this case a pardon would be to prevent what is, in my view and that of many others, a grotesque miscarriage of justice. Scooter Libby faces two and a half year in jail for the crime of practicing politics in Washington, D.C. Nor would it cost Bush much politically. People who wish him ill anyway would be up in arms, of course. I can just hear Senator Schumer on the Sunday talk shows calling it, in Schumer’s apparently one and only political metaphor, “a dagger to the heart of the American justice system.” But most people just don’t give a damn. It’s political inside baseball that only the chattering classes care about. If the President were to pardon Scooter Libby, it would be a three-day story at most.
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