On the Right - Pardon Clinton !#! - Brief Article - Column

National Review, Feb 5, 2001 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

NEW YORK, JANUARY 16

The meeting of Tory intellectuals and men of affairs pondered the question: Should Clinton be pardoned?

Important to wait until after he is indicted, one man said. If Bush pardons him before an indictment, there will be those who will argue that he would never have been indicted, and that therefore the pardon was a kind of ex post facto slander, as in, I forgive my wife for committing adultery, when in fact she had been chaste. But the advocate of permitting due process to go on at its own pace held his ground: The organic judicial process should be permitted to go its own way. After all, if a grand jury isn't persuaded that Bill Clinton committed perjury in the Paula Jones business and, later, in his deposition in the White House, then any hope for rectilinear thought lapses, and justice is become a plaything.

A seasoned observer says: Look at it this way. The loss of critical Senate seats by tough-minded conservatives-John Ashcroft in Missouri, Spence Abraham in Michigan, Slade Gorton in Washington, Bill Roth in Delaware-has tipped the scales in Washington. Although the GOP has a formal majority, with 50 senators and the deciding vote of the vice president, the loss of critical stouthearted men affects the deployment of power. Now hear this: If President Bush antagonizes wobbly Republicans and sullen Democrats by declaring a posthumous war on Clinton, the victim may be not Clinton himself, but a Bush program. Bush can get right away an end to partial-birth abortion, a substantial revision of the death tax, critical reinforcement of the military-why endanger such substantial goals by vitalizing Clinton loyalists and the hordes of people who will maintain a sympathetic position towards the ex-president? Isn't it better to pardon him, and be done with it?

The dominant view in the discussion says this: American justice can go no further in addressing miscreant behavior by a president than to impeach him. Yes, the procedure isn't consummated where the Senate fails to convict. You have here coitus interruptus on a demoralizing scale. After the Senate failed to ratify the House's impeachment, Clinton gradually transformed the case against him. Beginning immediately, Mrs. Clinton classified it all as the workings of a vast right-wing conspiracy. We could smile at that kind of thing as nothing more than uxorious docility, but the language of justification crept into the campaign. During the election season, it was the hunters who became the hunted. President Clinton spent less time defending his debauchery and his lies than Henry Hyde spent defending the bona fides of the House of Representatives that thought the whole Clinton performance constituted an impeachable offense.

And this speaks to the true explosive in the argument for indicting Clinton. It is that the American people are clearly opposed to doing so and are therefore a critical shock absorber. The point stressed in pursuing Mr. Clinton is that justice must be made to prevail because justice is sacred to American ideals. But if we have established that justice has squatted down with the defense, what can the prosecution effectively accomplish?

The way to handle Clinton is to get rid of objective requirements to pay him notice. It would be ideal simply to close him off as an overexposed public-policy encephalophone, but there is no way to put Bill Clinton in Coventry; he commands too many legions. What you can do is avoid formal entanglements before grand juries and petit juries and courts of appeal-where it all ends knows only God.

Lesson for Mr. Bush: Pardon him. And don't let any note of equivocation creep into the language. Drop him as you would an excess ton of weight on a ship. Reconcile yourself that it won't sink to the bottom of the sea, as all healthy dead weights should-it will flounder about forever. But sail on, and ignore him as best you can. Right-minded policies and a straight course might, in fact, have the best chances of finally sinking the contaminated Clinton ghost ship.