Another lesson to draw from Clinton's impeachment and trial is that the Independent Counsel Act, which is up for reauthorization this spring, should not be renewed--in other words, that it should be allowed to die--but for a reason different than those cited by most of the law's critics.  Republican critics of the office of Independent Counsel have consistently maintained that the law has the potential to create a kind of Frankenstein monster, such as Lawrence Walsh, the out-of-control Iran-Contra independent counsel who turned policy differences between the executive and legislative branches into crimes for which he prosecuted Reagan and Bush administration officials.  (For an interesting account of Walsh's excesses by one of his victims, see Elliott Abrams' book, Undue Process: A Story of How Political Differences Are Turned into Crimes (1993).)  Compared to Walsh, Ken Starr doesn't even come close to being an out-of-control prosecutor; under his watch, the Office of Independent Counsel is far from being the "Starr Chamber" portrayed by Democrats, who have opposed the Act only recently, when it began to be used against Clinton himself and other Clinton Administration officials.  As noted below, Starr's basic fault is that he's been too cautious, too timid, too conservative (in the legal, not political sense).
 No, the basic problem with the Independent Counsel Act isn't the discretionary authority it gives to the Independent Counsel.  Rather, as the Clinton case shows, the basic problem is that the Act  has made it actually more difficult to hold presidents accountable for the abuse of power.  This was the interesting thesis advanced by political commentator Paul Gigot at the Federalist Society National Lawyers' Convention in Washington, D.C. last November, and I think Gigot's quite right.  As he observed, the existence of an independent counsel provides a political shield for the president (a target for his minions, such as that snake, James Carville, to demonize) as well as an excuse for the regular institutions of political oversight of the executive branch--the Congress and the news media--to abdicate their responsibility.  "The cause of presidential responsibility would have been better served had the office of independent counsel never existed," Gigot concluded.  His comments lead me to wonder how history would have turned out differently if Clinton had been investigated by Justice Department officials, whom he might fire if they got too close; but if he did--as Nixon did in his firing of Archibald Cox in the infamous "Saturday Night Massacre" of 1973--public opinion would turn against him.  Or, better yet, how public opinion might have been different if Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, and the Lewinsky matter were investigated, not secretly by the Independent Counsel's office, but publicly, by a Congressional committee, such as the select Senate committee (the Ervin Committee) which investigated Watergate in 1973, bringing all the sordid facts of administration wrongdoing to daily public scrutiny.  Clinton really owes a lot to Kenneth Starr.
 Starr, incidentally, is far from the "right-wing," Clinton-hating demon that the James Carvilles of the world have conjured up.  Politically, he's more of a moderate; a man who, before his investigation of Clinton, was widely known for his integrity and caution, and was respected as a jurist by both Republicans and Democrats.  If Starr is to be faulted for anything in his role as independent counsel, he should be faulted for being too cautious, for letting Clinton "off the hook" on Whitewater, Travelgate, and Filegate.  In his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, Starr indicated the reasons why his referral to Congress focused solely on the Lewinsky matter.  It wasn't--as Clinton apologists gleefully assert--because he "found nothing" on the other matters; rather, it was because he has too narrow a view of what constitutes impeachable offenses.  Laws indeed were broken in these other matters: in Whitewater, a fraudulent savings-and-loan was created and taxpayers were looted for some $40 million; in Travelgate, the powers of the FBI and Justice Department were used to bring false charges against White House employees to provide political cover for Clinton friends; and in Filegate, nearly 1000 raw FBI files were illegally kept in the White House for political purposes.  The problem was that Starr's office found no evidence linking Clinton personally and directly to these violations of law (or, in the case of Whitewater, the link depended on the dubious testimony of Clinton's fellow conspirators).  Had Starr followed the standards used by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 in its articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon--which charged Nixon with responsibility for acts committed by his subordinates--his referral to Congress could have charged Clinton with literally dozens of additional impeachable offenses. Again, one can only speculate how history would have turned out differently if Starr were really as rabid a prosecutor as his enemies assert.

7.  The Presidency.

 Contrary to what Clinton apologists have asserted, the exercise of the House's constitutional authority to impeach the president--for only the second time in the nation's history--will not weaken the institution of the presidency.  Too bad, because the presidency in the 20th century is an institution which needs to be weakened, as its powers have dangerously expanded, far beyond anything intended by the Constitution's framers.  To cite just two examples, modern presidents--both Democrat and Republican--have usurped from Congress the power to initiate war and, through excessive use of the veto (on political grounds, rather than the constitutional grounds intended by the framers), have wrestled away from Congress much of its legislative power, essentially raising the majority required for passage of laws from the simple majority stipulated by the Constitution to the two-thirds majority needed to override a presidential veto.  Vigorous use of the impeachment power by the House of Representatives might yield a much-needed "ratcheting-down" of excessive presidential power.
 The Senate's acquittal of Clinton, in contrast, raises the real danger that, from now on, Clinton and his successors in office--at least if they enjoy the same high poll numbers--will be held less accountable for their abuses of power.  In other words, an already dangerously powerful office may have become even more powerful--thereby negating whatever good that House impeachment accomplished.  This realization underscores how truly stupid were those Republican Senators who voted to acquit Clinton, such as Susan Collins of Maine, who said she cast her vote "not for the current president but for the presidency."

8.  Clinton.

 Call him what you will: Slick Willy, the Perpetrator-in-Chief, "Clintonocchio," or--my personal favorite, because it's so apt--a line uttered by Robert DeNiro's character in the movie, "Midnight Run": "a slimeball on a sea of pus."  But don't call him "Mr. President," because he has utterly disgraced the office he holds and is the most unfit man ever to occupy the Executive Mansion.  Utterly shameless, he's the class "bad boy" most of us remember from our childhoods--the kid who could get away with virtually anything, with other people taking the blame, because he'd charm his way out of any difficulty.  Except that this "bad boy" continues to occupy the most powerful office on earth, with life-and-death powers over millions--indeed billions--of people, not only in the United States but around the world.
 Clinton's "legacy," such as it is, is that he has headed the most corrupt and scandal-ridden presidential administration in American history, one in which abuses of power and criminal acts have been performed not only by members of the Cabinet and other presidential subordinates (as they were in the Grant, Harding, and Nixon administrations) but also by the president himself (to a far greater extent than Nixon).  And, ironically, Clinton has benefitted from the very pervasiveness of his own wrongdoing: the public has become apathetic (as discussed below) because there have been so many scandals:  Whitewater, "Travelgate," "Filegate," the deaths of Vince Foster and Ron Brown, the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit, the Democratic fundraising abuses generally and "China-gate" in particular, "Wampum-gate"--which is Ann Coulter's name for the Indian casino shakedown--and myriad other minor scandals involving the politicization of the Commerce Department, the Justice Department, the IRS, and other executive branch agencies.  So many scandals, in fact, that it's easier to refer to them all collectively as simply "Clintongate."
 But the one scandal for which he will be remembered first in the history books--not the most egregious but the one that led to his impeachment and trial--will be Clinton's use of his office to obtain sexual favors from a young White House intern and employee named Monica Lewinsky, and his subsequent acts to cover up that affair to avoid liability in the Paula Jones case.  And, of course, history will remember the famous blue dress that verified Ms. Lewinsky's story and blew (if you pardon the pun) Clinton's cover.  The "Come-back Kid" has become the "Cum-stain Kid"!  He's the "Oval Office O.J.," acquitted by a politicized "jury" in the Senate but adjudged guilty of his crimes by a large segment of the American people. And his legacy in history will be alongside Andrew Johnson's and Richard Nixon's, right where it belongs.

9.  Academics and the Media.

 The Clinton case has exposed, if any additional evidence is needed, the strong left-wing biases of both the academic world and the news media.  The nation's colleges and universities have been called the "last bastions" of socialism in America, and that's especially true of the nation's law schools.  Professor James Lindgren of Northwestern has estimated that 80% of American law professors are Democrats (with 13% Republicans and 6% independents), which suggests that the real problem with "diversity" in law schools has much less to do with skin color or sex but rather ideology.  The strong pro-Clinton, anti-Republican bias of most law professors was made most evident to me at a session I attended at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) in New Orleans in January. Billed as a "town hall" on impeachment (a dangerous sign in itself, for one thing demonstrated in the Clinton years has been the utter idiocy of any event billed as a "town meeting"), the event was more like a cross between a political rally and a religious revival, with most of the law professors in attendance acting like a roomful of braying donkeys (quite literally so). And the bias of many of the nation's professors in other fields was evident in the well-publicized open letter to the New York Times signed by 400 so-called "Historians in Defense of the Constitution," the majority of whom were not the "constitutional experts" they claimed to be but who were, rather, overwhelmingly leftist, partisan supporters of Clinton.
 As for media bias, one obvious difference I've noticed between coverage of the scandal-ridden Republican president, Nixon, and his current Democratic counterpart is that, in 1973-74, the president was seldom dignified by the title of his office--he was not "President Nixon," but rather "Mr. Nixon," every night on the 6:30 news; while Clinton has been consistently called "President Clinton."  And to most of the media--even such supposed anti-Clinton outlets as the Columbus Dispatch and our local TV news stations--the crisis of the past year has been identified not as Clinton, but rather "The White House" or "The President," who's "under fire."  That's simply wrong and misleading: it wasn't "The President" who was impeached and tried, but rather the man who temporarily holds the office of president.  As noted above, to anyone who cares about the integrity of the office--to anyone who considers Clinton's actions objectively, free of partisan Democratic biases--Clinton lost his right to use the title long ago.
 And finally, last but not least,

10.  The American People.

 Perhaps it's my Jeffersonian optimism--my overall confidence in what Jefferson called the "good sense" of the people--that prevents me from joining the chorus of libertarians and conservatives who've condemned the American people, or that 60 percent or more of them, who have opposed Clinton's impeachment and removal from office.  William Bennett, for example, writes in his February 10th Wall Street Journal piece, "The hard truth is that many Americans are not merely tolerating Mr. Clinton; they are embracing him. ... They think Mr. Clinton's character is bad but no longer believe character matters. ... They hold a president to a lower standard of behavior than they hold people in virtually any other profession," and they "refuse to hold a president accountable for lawlessness."
 Clinton's popularity, in my view, can be explained largely by what I'd characterize as the well-intentioned ignorance of the American people. Clinton's defenders have been fairly successful in portraying the impeachment as a "political witchhunt," as "sexual McCarthyism," as if the effort to remove Clinton were based on adultery alone, and not on truly criminal acts.  Most Americans who naively support Clinton--including, ironically, many lawyers and law professors, who should know better--simply do not understand the rule of law issue, seeing instead the case against Clinton as one grounded in "right-wing" Puritanism.  I take solace in my belief that, rather than being immoral or amoral, the American people generally are libertarian--they believe in a "live and let live" philosophy, from which "Bubba," ironically, has benefitted.  I just wish more Americans would be as libertarian in their stance on other political issues!
 Far more dangerous than the ignorance of many Americans is their political apathy.  As noted above, the irony of Clinton's presidency is that it's so scandal-ridden that many Americans simply have become immune to news of further abuses of power; it's something like the old nursery story of "Chicken Little," who cries so frequently that "the sky's falling," that when it really does, no one believes her.  Thus, Bill Bennett may have been too optimistic when he concluded his piece by predicting, "This story will go on; more shoes will drop, more doors will open, more ugly facts will come to light.  Perhaps over time the public will see things for what they are." Instead, it's possible that the public will allow Clinton to continue using and abusing the powers of his office shamelessly and irresponsibly, depriving Americans of more of their freedoms and creating even more dangerous precedents for the future.  And the American people, or many of them, may prove themselves unworthy to be citizens of a free society.