Tag: Government

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Editorial Opinion

Metro Revisited

For Mayor Willie Herenton, there was good news and bad news related to the visit to Memphis Tuesday of one of his illustrious counterparts: outgoing Nashville mayor Bill Purcell.
The bad news first: Though, of course, it might not have been meant as a reflection on our own mayor’s candidacy for reelection, some members of the Memphis Rotary Club, where Herenton introduced Purcell for this week’s luncheon address, floated an interesting idea afterward. They affected to wonder privately if Purcell could be talked into taking up residence in Memphis and running for mayor here. Seriously, folks, he won’t. After an upcoming spell as a fellow at Harvard University, Purcell is almost certain to get set to run for governor of Tennessee in 2010. Indeed, over the next few years, you can expect to see Purcell speaking from Tennessee podiums ranging from here to Bristol.

Now the good news: In the course of a compelling speech to the Rotarians, in which he cited all the good things that have come to Nashville under his two terms, Purcell engaged in some special pleading for the idea of metro government. As he put it, “Metropolitan government is the smartest thing that Nashville ever did.” And, during his summing up on that point, Purcell suggested that if Memphians wanted a government that was too big, too expensive, and too political, they should keep things just the way they are.

All the while Nashville’s mayor was saying these things, Herenton was up there on the dais smiling. As well he might. For in his appearance before the Coalition for a Better Memphis last week (see Politics, p. 16), Herenton cited his well-known belief in metropolitan government as the one most important concrete proposal he intended to put forth if reelected to a fifth term. As stale as the idea may have sounded at the time, it was certainly revivified when Purcell itemized the positive effects of metro government in the three areas he considered most important to Nashville: education, public safety, and quality of life.

Ay, but there’s the rub. Systems of government are one thing. The people who run them are another, and when Purcell discoursed upon how he happened to choose his top police official — a seasoned cop with recent credentials in New Orleans and Washington state, selected after a national search — what he said contrasted starkly with the reality of what we have known in Memphis: serial police directors, mainly yanked up from the ranks by Herenton and sent back to them at various intervals.

Herenton, who made a point of noting that the popular Purcell, a former state legislator, had been term-limited out of office as mayor, may be right in his own estimation of the value of metropolitan government, but in his four terms so far, he has not been able to make the case for it with residents either of the city or of the county.

To what extent this is Herenton’s own fault is a subject worthy of debate in its own right (yet another reason why we regret the mayor’s shunning the opportunity for back-and-forth encounters with his electoral foes this year). But our mayor is right in one respect: As Purcell’s testimony corroborates, the idea of metro government itself is well worth reconsidering.

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Editorial Opinion

If It Is Broke, Fix It!

One of the most tiresome aspects of the current political situation in this country is that our two major political parties — which, until quite recently in our history, were aggregates of various constituencies, not ideological monoliths — now oppose each other almost solely on the basis of catechisms.

Nowhere is this more odious than when it comes to dealing with taxes and government expenditures. Everybody on both sides toes a party line. Though few Democrats like to admit it, their party has indeed, as the rival GOP charges, been too dependent on throwing money at intractable social problems. A case in point was the debate in the Tennessee General Assembly this year, in which the Democrats, at Governor Bredesen’s behest, insisted on routing an expected $230 million tobacco-tax windfall into state education. The state House of Representatives’ Republicans proposed a panoply of amendments whereby the money would go to this or that alternative worthy cause — eliminating the sales tax on groceries, for example. Unfortunately, it was generally recognized that the GOP’s strategy was to get the bill amended so it would have to be approved all over again in the Senate — where the Democrats at the time happened to have a couple of absent legislators. Meaning: disapproved. The sad fact is that too many Republicans think no public money is ever required to do anything at all.

Though here and there some brave and independent souls — Democratic state representatives Mike Kernell and Larry Turner of Memphis were two such — broke with party discipline (in their case, to advocate a serious catch-up program in health care), the argument came down to My Pork versus Your Pork. Or more precisely, Pork vs. No Pork. And, nationally as well as statewide, variants of that argument continue on a more or less party-line basis. (See Preston Lauterbach’s “Pork Product?,” on p. 11.)

But maybe the recent bridge catastrophe in Minneapolis will be a prod to both parties, as the Gulf Coast’s devastation by Hurricane Katrina was — or should have been — in 2005.

Unfortunately, not much has been done to amend the still perilous circumstances facing New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf area. The current national administration seems to believe that Katrina was a freak event, not due to be repeated for another thousand years or so. (That’s one thing that comes from a willful disbelief in global warning.)

But, encouragingly, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who only a month ago was basking in the praise of his Republican colleagues for refusing to approve two different tax proposals to fix his state’s aging infrastructure, has experienced a sudden enlightenment as a result of the lethal collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge. “He’s open to that” is what a spokesman for the governor now says about a new tax for repairing infrastructure.

To paraphrase the poet Schiller, he comes late but he comes. Hallelujah! Having just learned from the federal government’s latest National Bridge Inventory that no fewer than 150 bridges right here in Shelby County are adjudged to be either “obsolete or deficient,” we’d just as soon that our own state government rethink its own priorities — free from all the tired old arguments about “pork” and taxation.

We live here, and we happen to think public safety is worth paying for.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

What Gives?

Three members of the Shelby County Commission cast votes Monday for a proposal that may be good politics but makes for unsound public policy. This initiative — for a five-cent across-the-board reduction in the county property tax — came from Wyatt Bunker, who represents the county’s suburban and rural edge and its ideologically conservative edge, as well.

According to Bunker, the proposal, if enacted, would have cut $8 million out of county revenues for the next fiscal year — although the commissioner maintains that such a cut would, sooner or later, raise revenues. Right. The same logic pursued by the relentlessly tax-cutting Bush administration has driven the national deficit to new historical heights.

Various of Bunker’s commission colleagues expressed exasperation with the proposal, especially since A) it came just after a tense debate concerning the commission’s need to divert wheel-tax money originally earmarked as operating funds for the schools into the county’s general fund, where it can be tapped for future capital improvements, and B) it followed weeks of a painstaking budgetary process, now concluded, in which every stray corner of county government was scrutinized for real or potential waste.

Yet, two other commissioners, fellow suburbanite George Flinn and Chairman Joe Ford of Memphis’ inner city, joined with Bunker in voting for the proposal which, had it passed, would have thrown county government back to square one in its financial planning for the next cycle.

What gives? Well, the legitimate needs of the taxpayers would have been first. As several commissioners pointed out, the needs of the schools would have come asunder, closely followed by law enforcement. It made a certain political sense for Bunker and Flinn to vote the way they did, since they represent (or believe they represent) constituents who favor tax cuts at all costs. But what was Chairman Ford, who normally balances policy and service needs with the legitimate requirements of fiscal solvency, thinking?

Ford, who must have known the discussion and the vote were pro forma, urged Bunker to reintroduce the proposal next year. Fair enough. At least that will give the commission enough lead time to reorganize fiscal priorities so as to facilitate such an across-the-board cut, if that’s what they regard as needful. Given Governor Bredesen’s success in imposing drastic cuts when he took office in 2003, we’re not saying the idea of an across-the-board cut is impossible. But the last time we looked, the governor was taking some criticism of policy changes (his gutting of TennCare, for example) that we regard as legitimate.

Property owners are surely entitled to relief and deserve consideration of the sort just awarded in Nashville, where state senator Mark Norris and state representative John DeBerry won passage of legislation authorizing the state’s local governments to enact limited tax freezes for seniors.

Those eligible in Shelby County are homeowners at least 65 years old with incomes not exceeding $31,549. That amounts to 59 percent of the county’s senior households and is consistent with Shelby County’s unique need for balance between revenues and services. When it can, the commission should act upon the new law. Anything more drastic will have to wait.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Don’t Trust Government

In reading an excellent book, Satanic Purses: Money, Myth and Misinformation, by R.T. Naylor, I suddenly realized why Adolf Hitler was so popular during the first years of his administration.

The funny thing is that the book is not about Hitler or Germany but about the U.S. and the bogus war on terror. It is an outstanding book, carefully researched and footnoted and written in a reasonable manner, though with delicious dollops of sarcasm.

It’s the carefully detailed accounts of injustices committed by the U.S. government against American Muslims that gave me the insight about Hitler.

In the early days of the Third Reich, if you weren’t a criminal, a communist, or a Jew, you never saw the dark side of the Nazi government. You saw an economy being revitalized, superhighways being built, Germans being put back to work, the disgraceful Versailles Treaty being scrapped. It must have looked a lot like morning in Germany to the people who had suffered through runaway inflation, economic depression, and street riots.

Similarly, if you are not a Muslim or an Arab-American who has been a victim of the Patriot Act and other laws carelessly passed in the hysteria following the attacks in 2001, then the Bush administration probably looks perfectly normal. You probably even believe that it is really protecting you from terrorists, just as many Germans believed Hitler was protecting them from the “bad guys.”

What Taylor’s book demonstrates is how often this is pure nonsense and at the same time what terrible damage is being done to the rule of law and America’s traditional respect for human rights.

Typically, the government will swoop down and seize an organization’s records and computers, while making public accusations of the people being “involved” with terrorists. The important point is that this is done before any determination of guilt or innocence has even begun. By the time a defendant gets to court, if he ever does, he’s ruined. Quite often, then the fearless feds will say, “Well, never mind about this terrorist business, just plead guilty to a minor immigration violation.” Often defendants are bullied into admitting guilt they don’t deserve by threats of being declared an enemy combatant, which means indefinite imprisonment, probably for life.

You can see the process going on with the four men charged with planning to blow up the fuel lines to JFK International Airport in New York. In the first place, it is common knowledge that if you blow up a fuel line, you will get an explosion and fire at one point. The claim that the whole pipeline would blow up for miles is nonsense, and the government knows that, but it threw that out to claim the plot endangered “thousands” of lives.

The real question is: Did these guys actually plan it or were they set up by the government’s federal informant? The federal government has a terrible record of using informants to entrap people. The whole tragedy of Ruby Ridge, which cost the lives of Randy Weaver’s wife and son, resulted from a federal informant who nagged Weaver into sawing off the barrels of a shotgun, something any kid can do with a vice and a hacksaw. The feds then arrested Weaver with the intention of forcing him to become an informant, and the tragic farce ensued.

So even though you haven’t felt the arbitrary and unjust power of the government, you should read Satanic Purses and find out just how much deception is involved in this war on terror. You’ll discover how often oil, diamonds, and big business play behind-the-scenes roles in this current so-called war.

As the German people discovered, once a government has unlimited power, it will eventually use that power against everyone.

Charley Reese writes for Lew Rockwell Syndicate. He has been a journalist for 50 years.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Feeling the Sting

When, as virtually the last matter taken by the prosecution in former state senator John Ford‘s Tennessee Waltz trial, a $50,000 Rolex watch came into evidence, Ford and his support group, which included numerous members of his immediate and extended families, seemed of good cheer.

As was chronicled here last week, Ford felt sunny enough after that day’s testimony to engage in banter with the two FBI agents, Mark Jackson and Brian Burns, who had testified to being the originators of the entire Tennessee Waltz sting — the means whereby Ford and several other state legislators and other public officials had been induced to accept money in return for legislative favors.

If the watch — a gift from developer Rusty Hyneman that prosecutors were attempting to use as “predication” (proof of Ford’s disposition toward corruption) — had an outer-space element (it was partly made of material derived from a meteorite), so had the sting devised by Jackson and Burns and acted out by three other principals, FBI agents “L.C. McNeil” and “Joe Carson” (the names were pseudonyms) and undercover informant Tim Willis.

The premise of the sting was that a computer-recycling firm calling itself E-Cycle (it was an FBI shell company, as things turned out) needed expert assistance from the likes of Ford and was willing to pay for it — in the senator’s case, to the tune of $55,000.

Aided by defense attorney Mike Scholl, Ford felt that he had a strong prospect for nothing worse than a hung jury (indeed, Scholl would base his closing argument on an appeal to each juror to “act as an individual”).

The very fact that he felt like engaging in humorous asides with the professed architects of his then-pending peril was evidence that Ford and his supporters saw the predication case to be weak enough that he might indeed catch a break from one or two jurors.

Evidently Ford was right, but not right enough. When jurors fell to deliberating on Wednesday, following closing arguments, they did deadlock on the charge of extortion — an indication that Scholl’s claim of entrapment had found some sympathetic ears.

Equally tenuous were the three counts of witness intimidation — all ultimately resulting in not-guilty findings, at least partly because the main witness against Ford on that count, Willis, had seemed disingenuous or worse during a hard day of cross-examination by Scholl.

But the charge of bribery was buttressed by what seemed an endless series of videotapes showing Ford being handed money — $55,000 altogether — by McNeil, who had made sure to connect the payoff to specific talk about legislative action by Ford.

Ford’s mood had conspicuously turned gloomy by Thursday afternoon, when jurors and other trial principals were reconvened to hear Judge Daniel Breen‘s ruling on a definition requested by the jury: What precisely was the meaning of the term “under color of official right”?

When the judge ruled that it referred to actions by a public official, the feeling had almost palpably spread to all followers of the trial that some tide had turned against Ford. In fact, the question had to do with the extortion count, but its import was more general, and, as it turned out, there was no disagreement among jurors on the bribery charge.

Whatever sentiment there was that racial or political factors might have influenced the Tennessee Waltz prosecution (and on the latter score there was and is a considerable amount of suspicion; see City Beat, p. 14), the jury of six blacks and six whites did its duty by the evidence confronting their eyes and ears.

Hypothetically, all of this could come undone in the course of some appeal. In any case, John Ford has very little in the way of a breathing spell. Though he remains free on bond, he is up for trial again next week in Nashville, on charges relating to accepting money in return for legislative favors — this time on behalf of a real company.

• Shelby County assessor Rita Clark, the Germantown homemaker and Democratic activist who surprised herself and everybody else by winning her maiden political race in 1996, then went on to win twice more, won’t run again in 2008.

Clark announced her decision to members of the Shelby County Commission during budget hearings on her department Monday morning.

Asked to accept a 5 percent cut for the next fiscal year, Clark declared such a thing “impossible” and then went on to tell the commissioners she would not run for reelection and didn’t want to saddle her successor with a departmental budget that was too small.

Elaborating on that later on, Clark said, “My budget now is the same as it was when I came into office. There’s no way we could continue to provide an appropriate level of service with less.”

Although she had worked in other candidates’ political campaigns, Clark had never made a race of her own until 1996, when the late Democratic eminence Bill Farris prevailed on her to run against incumbent assessor Harold Sterling.

Clark was widely regarded at first as a pro forma candidate — someone to maintain her party’s presence on the ballot. She ultimately proved to be much more — fighting a hard mano-a-mano campaign against Sterling by questioning his hiring of a personal trainer and an out-of-county assistant.

She won in an upset, going away, and in the process her continued success suggested to many Democrats that, all other factors being equal, someone of her race and gender made an ideal countywide candidate.

To date, no other Democrat — except for Mayor A C Wharton — has been able to crack the Republican monopoly on countywide offices.

Commenting Monday on her decision not to seek reelection next year, Clark cracked wryly, “It’s just time. I’m afraid if I ran again, my husband would oppose me. And I couldn’t beat him.”

• Both Democratic candidates for the vacant District 89 state House seat, Kevin Gallagher and Jeannie Richardson, held campaign fund-raiser/receptions last week, as that campaign begins to mount in earnest. Two Republicans are also competing for their party’s nomination: Wayne McGinnis and Dave Wicker Jr.

Responding to at least one Gallagher supporter’s published skepticism concerning her residence (and the identity of her Midtown housemates), Richardson, a former inhabitant of Mud Island, said, “The people who live here with me are my son, my daughter, and my granddaughter, and I do hope they’ll all be active in my campaign.”

Both parties’ special primaries will be held May 31st, with the two winners facing each other in a July 17th general election.

• Still feeling their oats are a group of local Memphis bloggers who have been sought out of late for audiences by political figures like state Senate speaker pro tem Rosalind Kurita (D-Clarksville) and Memphis mayoral candidate Herman Morris.

Now, the group, whose efforts are pooled under the umbrella site memphisliberalblogosphere.blogspot.com, have been asked for another sit-down — this time by teacher Bill Morrison, a Democrat who ran a game but ultimately unsuccessful race for Congress last year against 7th District incumbent Marsha Blackburn, one of the Republican Party’s stars.

Morrison evidently plans to take on another behemoth — this time City Council incumbent Jack Sammons.

Both Sammons and his friend and fellow Super-District 9 council member Tom Marshall are presumed to be candidates for reelection, but each is also rumored to be still considering a race for mayor.

• It is still too early to write “finis” to the mayoral field. As of Tuesday morning, 14 petitions had been pulled from the Election Commission, and only one person — former Shelby County commissioner John Willingham — had actually filed.

Incumbent mayor Willie Herenton, presumably to cover his flank, made a point this week of dispatching a letter to Shelby County mayor Wharton, his erstwhile campaign manager, advising him that “no circumstances” would prevent him from running again and adding significantly, “I trust that your support will be evident.”

Without Wharton, who is still under pressure from potential backers to make a race, the “top tier” of mayoral candidates is generally considered to consist of Herenton, city councilwoman Carol Chumney, former MLGW head Morris, and Willingham. Some regard former FedEx executive Jim Perkins as belonging in that list, and there is talk also of a candidacy by entrepreneur/businessman Darrell Cobbins.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: A Careless Email

I’m sure I’m not alone in having done this: You get an email from an acquaintance — perhaps a co-worker worked up about something trivial or someone whose politics you despise or maybe even your boss.

The emailer rants and ego-struts and shows his buffoonery with every sentence. You are amazed and amused at this pompous maroon — so amazed and amused that you decide to share it with a friend. So you forward it, along with a snarky email of your own about what an idiot this fellow is. You smirk at your own cleverness and hit “send.”

Four seconds later, you realize that instead of forwarding the message to your friend, you’ve sent it back to the person you’re making fun of.

Panic ensues. You call the IT guy and ask if there’s any way to “call back” the email. He chortles as only an IT guy faced with 43 daily requests to “fix the copier” can chortle. “Nope,” he says. “Once it’s sent, it’s sent.”

I imagine the feeling one gets at such moments is similar to what’s going on in the White House these days. Unlike Nixon’s infamous missing 18 minutes of audiotape, e-mails are forever.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Democratic investigators are demanding access to a Republican National Committee/White House email system that was used by Karl Rove’s office and other top officials. Democrats suspect the system may have been used to end-run the official government system — a violation of federal law — to conceal contacts with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, among others.

The Times says some Republicans believe that the emails — many written hastily, with no thought that they might become public — may contain detailed and unguarded inside information about the administration’s far-flung political activities.

“There is concern about what may be in these emails,” said one GOP activist.

I can relate.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Reaching a Balance

Thanks to a spot that runs regularly on the local Air America radio affiliate, we learn that some or another major media source — we forget which, but we were impressed — declared Memphis “the greatest American place” back in 1998. If we are, it is because the conditions of our existence have historically compelled a mingling of cultures, resulting most noticeably in a series of glorious musical heritages. We use the plural on purpose, having heard music
historiographer David Evans of the University of Memphis discourse convincingly on the separate musical streams — ragtime, blues, jazz, R&B, rockabilly, rock-and-roll, and more — that have issued into the world from Memphis.

But our greatness in the future will depend on how well we achieve a synthesis of our populations in other ways, especially politically and socially. Like the rest of America, Memphis and Shelby County are now past that era in which the words “black” and “white” adequately describe ethnic variety. We are home now to Asians and Hispanics in truly significant numbers.

It is this last fact, along with the rough balance of Caucasians and African Americans in our mix, that made the honor conferred on us this past weekend by Major League Baseball so appropriate. In becoming the site of the first annual Civil Rights Game and, according to baseball commissioner Bud Selig, the likely permanent home of the game, Memphis achieved both a signal distinction and the opportunity to become an annual example to mankind.

That opportunity is a burden, too, of course. We may be currently notorious in the eyes of the state and nation for instances of public corruption, but few other American jurisdictions, we venture, have achieved an effective symmetry in government to the extent that we have.

Consider: The current congressman in Memphis’ 9th congressional district, Steve Cohen, is a white who won a hefty majority last year against a black opponent with a famous last name. The current mayor of Shelby County, where Caucasians still dominate on Election Day, is A C Wharton, an African American who won a lopsided majority in 2004 over a well-known white member of the County Commission.

A white candidate, City Council member Carol Chumney, has gained enough currency in Memphis’ black precincts to have finished ahead of Memphis’ incumbent black mayor, Willie Herenton, in the first major poll of city voters. Meanwhile, a significant number of influential whites are involved in the mayoral effort of another candidate, former MLGW head Herman Morris, who is African American.

Racial issues still flare up in local government. The current controversy over a proposed second Juvenile Court judge is a case in point, though even that issue has as much to do with reaching an effective balance between the county’s municipal and governmental jurisdictions as anything else.

We still argue at the table over who gets the best seat or the first cut of meat. But we sit down together, and we’re used to it. If we can take the next major step and stabilize population flow in an environment that is economically secure for all, we will, in fact, deserve to be called a great American place.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Ethical Dilemma

CREDIT: Maciej Oleksy | Dreamstime.com

Local governments have attorneys, planners, and engineers on staff, but it might be time to hire an ethicist. Or at least put one on retainer.

Under state law, local governing bodies are required to approve a new ethics policy by June 30,
2007. But last week, after a discussion over who should review ethics complaints, the County Commission ethics policy ad hoc committee sent its lawyers back to the drawing board.

Last year, in the wake of the Tennessee Waltz scandal, the state legislature enacted the 2006 Ethics Reform Act, which stipulates that local governments adopt ethical standards relating to conflicts of interest and gifts.

Under a mandate from the state, the County Technical Assistance Service developed a model policy that included a five-person County Ethics Committee to receive and investigate ethics violations. The model committee was to be composed of three county commissioners, one constitutional county officer (or another county commissioner), and one member of another board governed by the committee … or another county commissioner.

Mayor A C Wharton went before the ad hoc committee last week to suggest that the Shelby County panel should be composed of retired judges, lawyers, and business leaders.

“Whatever model we go with, there’s got to be a window that the public can peek in,” said Wharton. “We’ve got to get the public away from the idea that … elected officials just look out for each other.”

While Wharton thought that public involvement would add credibility to the county’s ethics policy, some members of the commission bristled at the thought of the general public constantly looking over their shoulders.

“I have a problem with laypeople trying to determine what’s legal and what’s not,” said Commissioner Sidney Chism. “You go on Web sites and read comments from people who think they are highly intelligent, and I find they’re just straight-out crazy.”

It’s an interesting question: Who is best suited to judge the ethics of elected officials? And who do elected officials think is best suited to judge them?

Commissioner Mike Carpenter noted that people face a jury of their peers every day at 201 Poplar, and those decisions can result in life sentences. Or worse.

Lawyer David Cocke, a member of the ad hoc committee, said that the public often demands ethics reforms that are more stringent than what is legally required. But even though that may scare local politicians, public involvement is the only thing that will satisfy and reassure an increasingly jaded citizenry.

“Everyone suspects politicians are going to take care of their own,” said Cocke. “You’ve got to find people who are impartial to make recommendations.”

The public cannot be blamed for believing that politicians look out for other politicians. Think about last year’s motion to censure City Council members Rickey Peete and Edmund Ford in the wake of federal bribery charges. The council couldn’t even find the votes to ask them to resign, much less censure them.

After the County Commission committee decided to craft a new draft based on the model policy, Commissioner Henri Brooks proposed keeping all allegations secret until an investigation had determined that an ethics violation had actually taken place. The commissioners wanted to protect against someone making ethics violation allegations for political gain.

Fair enough, but keeping allegations secret — even false ones — would be so much worse. Someone would leak the allegation to the media, reporters would call, and no one would be able to comment officially. But I’d bet the person who reported the ethics violation would be more than willing to talk, especially if it was a false allegation for political gain.

Too many politicians have abused the public’s confidence. If the public is going to trust elected officials, it’s going to take a lot more openness and a lot more information.

But as jaded as Shelby Countians are, they also seem very forgiving. Look at some of the dubious things John Ford was reportedly doing before he was indicted. People still like him. And Rickey Peete was reelected to the City Council after a bribery conviction.

But I could be wrong. Maybe my ethicist will know.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Someday, historians will wonder why the highest officials in the Bush Justice Department believed that they could inflict heavy-handed political abuse on federal prosecutors and get away with it. The punishment of the eight dismissed U.S. attorneys betrays a strong sense of impunity in the White House, as if the president and his aides assumed that nobody would complain about these outrages or attempt to hold them accountable.The precedent for this misconduct was set long ago.

There was once another Republican prosecutor who insisted on behaving professionally instead of obeying partisan hints from the White House. His name was Charles A. Banks, and the Washington press corps said nothing when he was punished for his honesty by the administration of the first President Bush.

The cautionary tale of Chuck Banks begins during the summer of 1992, as the presidential contest entered its final months with Arkansas governor Bill Clinton leading incumbent President George H.W. Bush.

At the time, Banks had already served for five years as the U.S. attorney in Little Rock. As an active Republican who had run for Congress and still aspired to higher office, he counted Clinton among his political adversaries. The first President Bush had recently selected him as a potential nominee for the federal bench. Nothing could have better served Banks’ personal interests than a chance to stop the Clintons and preserve the Bush presidency.

In September 1992, Republican activist L. Jean Lewis, who was employed by the Resolution Trust Corporation, provided that opportunity by fabricating a criminal referral naming the Clintons as witnesses in a case against the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association (the small Arkansas savings and loan owned by Whitewater partner and Clinton friend James McDougal).

The referral prepared by Lewis lacked merit — as determined by both Banks and the top FBI agent in his office — but Lewis commenced a persistent crusade for action against the hated Clintons. The FBI and the U.S. attorney repeatedly rejected or ignored her crankish entreaties.

Eventually, however, officials in the Bush White House and the Justice Department heard whispers about the Lewis referral. Obviously, that document had the potential to save the president from defeat in November by smearing the Clintons as corrupt participants in a sweetheart land deal.

That fall, Edith Holiday, secretary to the Bush cabinet, asked Attorney General William Barr whether he knew anything about such a referral. Although Barr knew nothing, he quickly sent an inquiry to the FBI. Weeks later, the president’s counsel, C. Boyden Gray, posed a similar improper question to a top Resolution Trust Corp. official.

The queries and hints from above created intense pressure on Banks to act on the Lewis referral despite his opinion, shared by the FBI, that her work was sloppy and biased. After Barr ordered him to act on the referral no later than two weeks before Election Day, he replied with a roar of conscience.

“I know that in investigations of this type,” he wrote in a remarkable memo to his boss, “the first steps, such as issuance of … subpoenas … will lead to media and public inquiries of matters that are subject to absolute privacy. Even media questions about such an investigation in today’s modern political climate all too often publicly purport to ‘legitimize what can’t be proven’ …

“I must opine that after such a lapse of time, the insistence for urgency in this case appears to suggest an intentional or unintentional attempt to intervene into the political process of the upcoming presidential election. … For me personally to participate in an investigation that I know will or could easily lead to the above scenario … is inappropriate. I believe it amounts to prosecutorial misconduct and violates the most basic fundamental rule of Department of Justice policy.”

The Whitewater case didn’t save the first President Bush, but it was later revived as a pseudo-scandal. More pertinent today is what happened to Banks and Lewis — and the U.S. attorney’s office in Little Rock.

Banks forfeited his promised judgeship and returned to private practice with his political career ended. The incompetent Lewis appeared before the Senate Whitewater Committee, where she lied repeatedly before “fainting” under examination by the Democratic counsel. She then disappeared from public view until 2003, when the White House rewarded her with an important federal job. Those who had observed Lewis in action were astonished when she was named chief of staff to the Pentagon Inspector General, at a salary of $118,000 a year.

An ugly sequel occurred in December, when the Justice Department ousted H.E. (Bud) Cummins III — another upstanding and competent Republican prosecutor in Little Rock — so that a crony of Karl Rove could replace him in the U.S. attorney’s office.

Was this what George W. Bush meant when he promised to return “honor” and “integrity” to the Oval Office?

Joe Conason writes for Salon and The New York Observer.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: On “Entering the Fray”

So I’m watching Larry King (don’t ask) interview Miss USA, Tara Conner. Conner, in true reality-show fashion, is confessing that she used cocaine and marijuana and generally misbehaved after her ascension to the Miss USA crown. And she, like so many others who’ve been caught misbehaving in recent months, used the “get out of trouble free” card and went to rehab.

As I was watching (shallow fellow that I am), I kept thinking, Why is this person Miss USA? I see prettier, smarter women than Tara Conner every day. The reason, of course, is that Conner entered the contest and beat out a few dozen other women who thought being Miss USA was a good idea. The women I know wouldn’t think of doing such a thing.

It’s similar to what happens in government. I know lots of smart, honest, charismatic people who would make great mayors, city councilmembers, senators, even presidents. But they don’t “enter the contest,” so we’re stuck with those who do, and, by and large, they tend to be mediocre. Or, even if they are outstanding folks going in, they become corrupted by the system and lose the common touch — and, often, common sense.

It’s how we get a George W. Bush. He’s inarticulate, inflexible, and apparently listens only to the sycophants and sociopaths he’s surrounded himself with, but he entered the contest, so for better and mostly worse, he’s our president. Likewise, with our senators, who despite receiving a clear message from the electorate, refuse (with few exceptions) to deliver that message to the president.

We desperately need leaders, here and in Washington, to speak for us. We need a mayor who will call the Toyota company and personally invite them to tour Memphis rather than offering “no comment” about the proposed auto plant in Marion, Arkansas. We need senators to show the kind of courage being displayed by our soldiers in Iraq. We need leaders who will stand up for what’s right. Otherwise, the whole country will be in rehab.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com