House of Eratosthenes

Scathing as it is, a comment like this wouldn’t be handed out by a college professor to just anyone. There is a not-so-subtle implication a great deal better work is expected from the intended recipient of the critique, compared with what passed under the teacher’s scrutiny. For that reason, I find it to be a more-than-a-fitting comment in response to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert’s editorial in USA Today Thursday:

There’s a right way

If the information we have read about the behavior of Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., seems as obvious to a jury as it does to me, he deserves to be vigorously prosecuted. I do not want to do anything that will interfere with that prosecution.

The issue that has concerned me, as Speaker, since Saturday night is not if the FBI should be able to search a member of Congress’ office, but rather how to do it within the boundaries of the Constitution.

On Thursday, President Bush recognized that serious constitutional issues needed to be resolved. He wisely directed the Department of Justice to send the documents (taken from Jefferson’s office last weekend) to the Solicitor General’s office for safekeeping for 45 days. This was a meaningful step. The president also encouraged the Justice Department to meet with us.

Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and I directed the lawyers for the House to develop reasonable protocols and procedures that will make it possible for the FBI to go into congressional offices to constitutionally-execute a search warrant.

In more than 219 years, the Justice Department has never found it necessary to use a search warrant to obtain documents from a congressional office. These issues have always been resolved without the necessity of a search warrant, and prosecutions have gone forward.

Justice Department officials now insist that this specific case required them, for the first time, to conduct a search. I regret that when they reached this conclusion, they did not work with us to figure out a way to do it consistently with the Constitution. But that is behind us now. I am confident that in the next 45 days, the lawyers will figure out how to do it right.

Someone return this otherwise-good typing paper to the Hon. Speaker Hastert, for someone has covered it with gibberish and put his good name at the top. Where it most assuredly doesn’t belong.

Speaker Hastert is known to me, albeit with a good deal less certainty than to someone who might be personally acquainted with him, as a man of integrity. I come to that conclusion after observing the events that resulted in his elevation to House Speaker in the first place. The transition between the 105th and 106th Congresses, rocked as it was by the then-recent impeachment of President Clinton, was a crisis of leadership. It seemed to be an endless game of hot-potato, and endless progression of “Speaker, Speaker, Who Is The Speaker,” until the baton finally came to rest in the steady hand of Congressman Hastert. Since then, over seven years I’ve heard nary a peep. I don’t know too much more about how things work under that strange old space under the dome compared to the next fellow, but I know when credit is due. And our current House Speaker deserves credit. Institutional credibility, I’ve observed over time, is a far easier thing to sabotage than to restore.

But I’m sorry, I don’t intend any disrespect. The stuff that somehow found its way under his by-line, above, is sheer nonsense.

“Boundaries of the Constitution?” What constitutional conundrum is it that challenges us here? William F. Buckley has taken a wild stab at figuring out what the confounding passage might be, which is a question I would rather prefer be subjected to unambiguous resolution by the Speaker himself. Lacking that, Buckley postulates we are talking about Article I Section 6, and I’m inclined to agree with him:

If the Constitution’s rule separating church and state can be held to mean that a replica of the scene at Bethlehem cannot be constitutionally displayed on state property, then maybe Mr. Jefferson is indeed protected, giving credibility to the new Hastert-Pelosi exegesis of the Constitution.

But stare down hard at the language. The Constitution holds that lawmakers are “privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same.”

That provision was intended to protect legislators from arrest for statements made in the course of their legislative duties. This has nothing to do with Mr. Jefferson’s case. Which means that those who say that the FBI should not have had access to the congressman’s home or office are extending that constitutional provision to the point of immunity from search.

House Majority Leader John Boehner said something about the issue having to do with independence of the legislative branch and separation of powers. This seems to be a contradiction with Hastert’s editorial, since Hastert appears to be acknowledging that a search of congressional offices with a warrant may be necessary, and now that it’s being done for the first time, that it be done “right.” Is a warrant not sanction from the judicial branch, and by design, protection against the executive branch going off half-cocked, gathering dirt on hitherto-independent legislators for nefarious ends?

I once had a position in computer network security. It was my job to enforce rules, to figure out where rules were inadequate, recommend new ones, and bring infractions to the attention of those who could do something about them. I had a boss whom I respected a lot, whose mantra was “if ya know something, ya gotta do something.” Put another way, if skullduggery is going on under your nose and you get nailed on it later on, whatever hopes you have of successfully pleading ignorance vanish with your plausible deniability. You know something, and do nothing — trouble awaits. The issue is one of trust.

Our House Speaker, whatever impeccable moral credentials he had before and that he might still have, has created an issue of trust where one didn’t exist before. Well perhaps that’s unfair…he further cemeted a lingering issue of trust, that otherwise might have eventually dried out, shriveled up, and fallen away. No, I wouldn’t bet money on that but hope springs eternal.

To put it simply, I don’t trust a government that finds out about malfeasance and then draws on legal precedent, however enshrined that precedent may be by the legal experts, to find creative new ways to “not know” things they do in fact know. It seems a congressman has accepted kickbacks. Let us cease and desist in the pointless debate about whether we ought to know what we know about it, and instead deliberate what to do now that it is indeed known.

Yeah, separation of powers is important. But the case has not been made, to my satisfaction anyway, that it’s an issue here. Meanwhile, the issue of equal protection under the law cries out for more attention, as does the issue of trust in our public officials.

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Otherwise Good Typing PaperSaturday, May 27th, 2006

Otherwise Good Typing Paper
Saturday, May 27th, 2006