Monday, March 24, 2014

Watergate Revisited? A hard look at the Obama-Nixon comparison

Richard Nixon

Is Barack Obama acting like Richard Nixon?
As someone who lived through the massive criminality and mendacity of Watergate, I take these comparisons seriously.
The shorthand “Watergate” stands for more than what the Nixon White House dismissed as a third-rate burglary at Democratic headquarters; it encompasses other break-ins, wiretaps, tax audits, hush money, cover-ups and perjury that sent many administration officials to jail and drove a president from office.
So for some on the right to accuse the current president of Nixonian behavior is a heavy charge indeed.
Here’s how Victor Davis Hanson frames it in National Review:
“Nixon tried to use the Internal Revenue Service to go after his political enemies — although his IRS chiefs at least refused his orders to focus on liberals…
“Nixon ignored settled law and picked and chose which statutes he would enforce — from denying funds for the Clean Water Act to ignoring congressional subpoenas.
“Nixon attacked TV networks and got into personal arguments with journalists such as CBS’s Dan Rather…
“Nixon wanted the Federal Communications Commission to hold up the licensing of some television stations on the basis of their political views…
“Nixon went after ‘enemies.’ He ordered surveillance to hound his suspected political opponents and was paranoid about leaks.”
Pretty bad stuff, right?
Now Davis lays out the particulars against this administration:
“The IRS? So far, the Obama-era IRS has succeeded in hounding nonprofit tea-party groups into political irrelevancy… 
“The FCC? According to FCC commissioner Ajit Pai, Obama’s agency, until outrage arose, had planned ‘to ask station managers, news directors, journalists, television anchors and on-air reporters to tell the government about their “news philosophy” and how the station ensures that the community gets critical information.’…
“Enemies? Federal authorities jailed a video maker for a minor probation violation after the Obama administration falsely blamed him for causing a riot that led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi in September 2012…
“Going after reporters? Obama regularly blames Fox News by name for its criticism…
“Ignoring the law? The Affordable Care Act as currently administered bears little resemblance to the law that was passed by Congress and signed by the president. Federal immigration law is now a matter of enforcing what the president allows and ignoring the rest.
“Wiretaps? Well, aside from the electronic surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency, the Obama Justice Department secretly monitored Fox News reporter and sometime critic James Rosen.”
The problem with most of these examples is there’s no evidence that Obama ordered, or knew about, these efforts. And that’s very different from Nixon, who as we know from the secret tapes, would talk about breaking into the Brookings Institution.
One prominent exception would be the surveillance of journalists such as those at the Associated Press and Fox’s James Rosen. Obama may not have personally known in advance, but his attorney general, Eric Holder, did.
Perhaps one day evidence will emerge that the president or his top aides encouraged the IRS Cincinnati field office to crack down on conservative groups, but so far there’s no proof.
The FCC’s aborted effort to question TV newsrooms about bias and philosophy was incredibly boneheaded and disturbing, but there is no sign of White House involvement—as opposed to Nixon’s FCC challenging the licenses of two Washington Post stations.
Did Obama order the filmmaker jailed? He rips Fox all the time, but he has sat down with Bill O’Reilly twice.
It is troubling that the president keeps unilaterally changing the implementation of ObamaCare. But it was George W. Bush who ramped up the practice of “signing statements” that reserved his right to ignore parts of newly passed congressional laws. (The House on Wednesday passed an "enforce the law" act on a largely party-line vote, and the administration is threatening a veto.)
Criticize Obama all you want. Davis has a point that civil libertarians who railed against Republican presidents have given Obama a pass (on such issues as NSA surveillance, I would add). But Nixonian conduct is an awfully high bar to clear unless you can show that a president personally condoned lawbreaking.

No special prosecutor for IRS scandal: Here’s the back story

Conservatives are up in arms over the Justice Department’s refusal to name a special prosecutor in the IRS scandal.
And that’s basically how the media covered it, as an Eric Holder vs. Ted Cruz argument.
But there’s some important history here that helps explain why the Obama administration is, in effect, able to investigate itself. And it’s a debate that goes to the heart of public confidence in government.
The attorney general’s office disclosed its decision in a letter to Cruz, saying the appointment is “not warranted” there is no “conflict of interest” in the Justice Department pursuing the case. The letter said the probe is being conducted by “career prosecutors and law-enforcement professionals…without regard to politics.”
The Texas senator fired back that Holder’s department is abandoning a “bipartisan tradition of the Department of Justice of putting rule of law above political allegiance.”
So how can the administration be trusted with such a sensitive probe? The reason Holder was able to make that decision goes back to Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.
Nixon was essentially pressured into allowing the appointment of a Watergate special prosecutor after his attorney general resigned and he needed Senate approval for a successor. The new AG, Elliott Richardson, named Archibald Cox, who proved so aggressive that Nixon had fired him (after Richardson and his deputy refused to do so and quit) in the infamous Saturday Night Massacre.
Public sentiment toward special prosecutors was favorable after Cox’s successor, Leon Jaworski, completed his work. Jimmy Carter pushed through a 1978 ethics law that included a provision for naming more neutral-sounding independent counsels. When allegations were made against a range of top federal officials, the attorney general was required to recommend such an appointment by a special three-judge panel, unless a preliminary inquiry found the charges to be “insubstantial.”
Ronald Reagan opposed extending the law, and it was narrowed in 1983. But a spate of high-profile investigations -- against Carter aide Hamilton Jordan, Reagan’s Labor secretary Ray Donovan, and Reagan’s attorney general, Ed Meese -- resulted in no charges.
Along came independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, who launched the $48-million Iran-contra investigation (into charges that money from U.S. arms sales to Iran was improperly diverted to Nicaraguan rebels).  Most Republicans wound up hating the law, believing that Walsh had too much unchecked power and was out of control.
After the Supreme Court upheld the law's constitutionality, Republicans helped filibuster the law to death in 1992. But Clinton signed a new version into law two years later -- and independent counsels pursued several of his Cabinet members. After Ken Starr’s investigation of the Whitewater land deal morphed into the Monica Lewinsky investigation, Democrats hated the law as well. It expired in 1999 without much fuss from either party.
That means every administration now gets to make the call on whether to call in an outside prosecutor not under Justice Department control.
When the IRS inspector general found improper targeting of conservative groups in the Cincinnati office, Obama called the conduct “inexcusable.” Last month, though, he told Bill O’Reilly there was not a “smidgen of corruption” in the IRS.
The problem is the same one that gave birth to the post-Watergate law. If Justice finds no higher-ups were involved in the IRS misconduct, would that finding have credibility with the public? Would an outside probe have more credibility, or spiral out of control?
With the independent counsel law dead and buried, we’re not likely to find out.
Nate Silver Gives GOP Nod
The data whiz who called President Obama’s election and has now moved to ESPN just gave the Republicans a favorable forecast for November.
Nate Silver says the GOP has a 60 percent chance of taking control of the Senate.
  Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington.

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