In fact, there is no wrong. To great numbers of people the very concept appears to sound antiquated, simplistic, even repressive. There is only being indictable or subject to fines or penalties under law, raps you can beat as distinct from the kind with moral force that you cannot beat no matter what the jury says about the relevance of some obscure section of the law or Congress’s probable legislative intent in 1883. This is a monumental distinction. It is what has rendered, and will continue to render, all our costly, embarrassing, politically tainted hearings and inquiries the ludicrous floor shows they are. All sides will be able to claim harassment, vindication and acquittal of some sort, based on some protracted legalish-looking hassle, and then go right back to their fancy barbers and book and TV agents. Order will have been restored.
The silence from all of our leaders on this subject–the moral rights and wrongs of what has been going on–has been total and chilling. They seem able only to whine that they wish they hadn’t had to do it, but they did because of the system or their naughty partisan siblings or something and, gosh, they certainly didn’t mean to break the law. Right? Wrong? What’s that?
We are copycats in this city, only pretty unimaginative ones, since we keep copying ourselves. And surely the descent into irrelevant criminal proceedings to address every political and ethical breach in contemporary times follows slavishly from the Nixon Watergate proceedings. They quickly became the model to which all other inquiry into official wrongdoing, or even judgment on it, was made to conform. Special prosecutors or independent counsel proliferated like mushrooms. Failure to name one became in itself an issue of cover-up or weak will. This was a real change. For until that time, a president or other public figure was not implicitly judged clean, never mind virtuous, by reason of not having committed an indictable offense. It was assumed he had not; that was the starting point, not the justification and/or pride of his conduct in office. Now it took a crime. The implicit corollary was that absent a prosecutable crime, the guy had a clean bill of health, ethically speaking.
A lot of people over the years, especially those who were investigated in this manner and incurred large legal expenses, have rightly complained of the attempt to criminalize unpopular political behavior or lapses in ethical judgment that fell far short of misdemeanors and felonies. I wish I had been more sympathetic to some of their complaints. It is kind of shocking when you go back over the episodes we turned into courtish things down through the decades. It took me aback the other day to read in a letter to the editor a rehash of a legal case over the heist of the Carter debate guidebook.
The important point, so far as purpose and outcome are concerned, of course, is that there is an absolute inversion here: although criminal and legal sound more menacing, this is far and away the best route to getting off free. For one thing, although hearings have a kind of superficial look and feel of court proceedings, all manner of conduct forbidden in court (or at least forbidden in courts not run by showbiz judges) goes on. Partisan Democrats and Republicans on the committee sit by and undermine, spin, lie, insinuate and do all other kinds of things that would get them tossed out of a real courtroom in a minute. PR campaigns are mounted showing what little Mickey Mouse things our officeholders are being accused of under the provisions of our Mickey Mouse code. We Al Caponeize the defendants: what did they do that’s so terrible if you only have them in the dock for tax hanky-panky. A full campaign to that effect is on now.
And there’s something to it, precisely because the more ingenious fooling around with various complicated provisions of the campaign-financing laws is a manifestly unworthy cause of indictment or impeachment of high federal officers, almost humiliating, a kind of certification that they never even did anything large or grand enough as national leaders concerned with war and peace and the economy and the actual destiny of the nation to be morally or politically worthy of high argument. They chiseled. They hocked the family china.
But finally we get back to the great silent issue of what is wrong, and, more important, of the evident inability of our leaders on all sides to say that something they did was wrong, or, even more depressing, to entertain the idea that such a thing could have happened. The issue in all this money-for-influence commerce has never, to my mind, been what the buyers, foreign or domestic, were trying to buy. Why wouldn’t they? The screaming issue has been what the sellers, our leaders, were willing to sell. Under the law, which is acting as a kind of protective shield for wrongdoing in all this, you need to prove a pretty identifiable quid pro quo, something demonstrable besides ““influence.’’ And there really is no acceptable law you could draw up, I think, that would regulate right and wrong behavior in this general area. It is made all the harder by the fact that so much of what people are selling right now is their good name, their (former) dignity, the impression of influence and access and so on, commodities of great value but near impossible to put a number to.
They knew what they were doing was wrong–excessive, demeaning, grubby, greedy and bad for the country, to the extent that they are still capable of comprehending such an idea. They also should have known that the remedy for this is not a law or a criminal legal threat but a sense of proportion, decency and restraint and the discipline to live by it. We’re not talking about something you have to go to law school to learn here. We’re talking about something you’ve spent all that time trying to get your kid to learn. Our leaders aren’t giving you much help.
