The Nation's Pulse/ The Meaning of Whitewater
Adams, James Ring
The Meaning of Whitewater by James Ring Adams 0 ne of the great mysteries of the modern world is why some scandals convulse American politics and others pass without a whimper. Richard Nixon...
...The Senate made a serious bipartisan effort, but it let the special counsel limit its scope, an unprecedented abdication of congressional power...
...One hopes it wasn't for his 1994 performance that the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation recently gave Gonzalez its Profiles in Courage award...
...It was foolish, but it was the sort of foolishness appropriate to the executive branch...
...But there is a hidden logic, and it explains why Whitewater, a conglomeration of shady loans and land deals, has already been called a constitutional crisis...
...The Whitewater investigators are paying a heavy price for their persistence, but without this outlet to Congress, they may well have been muzzled entirely...
...Jim Leach (and almost no one else) is arguing, congressional leaders are elevating the affair to a constitutional crisis by refusJames Ring Adams is The American Spectator's special Whitewater correspondent...
...In early February, shortly after the "smoking gun" meeting in which Washington tried to guide the outcome of the S&L regulators' criminal investigation of Madison Guaranty (See TAS, October 1994), Leach flew to Kansas City and interviewed the field investigators about the pressures from above...
...Designed to help you and your friends count down the last 2 years of the Clinton presidency...
...His Whitewater hearings this summer, the product of a leadership deal, were a ludicrous exercise...
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...This coup demands attention...
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...Richard Nixon resigned the presidency for behavior that in France, for instance, is government routine...
...cy could short out the safeguards built into the two-party system and the constitutional separation of powers...
...ing to do their duty of overseeing the executive branch...
...All through the eighties, the cover-up was abetted by the mainstream press, which proved totally unable to cope with anything requiring even modest financial sophistication...
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...If this round-about route works, it could make Leach's case moot...
...LEXIS' NEXIS IX* P.O...
...Iran-contra constituted another administration attempt to circumvent the will of Congress, the Boland amendment...
...In 1992, Clinton and Gore campaigned against "gridlock," their code word for the frustrations of two-party government...
...Imagine how things will go if the Gonzalez precedent catches on...
...701 N. Central, Bldg 3, Ste.300, Richardson, TX 75080 01994 Lame Puck, lnc.TN 57 Street Journal's news pages were worse than incompetent, slanting their coverage to favor the criminals...
...Gonzalez claimed that only the committee chairman has the power to conduct oversight, and the RTC under Roger Altman and John Ryan gladly complied...
...This petition has the force of a subpoena, and it may finally shake loose the 250 boxes of Madison-related documents the RTC is now holding in Kansas City...
...In the case of Whitewater, it has broken down...
...The nonpartisan civil service would lose its ultimate source of protection...
...This record is worth remembering when the bigfoot journalists on TV say Whitewater is boring...
...Some reporters for the Wall 56 The American Spectator November 1994 .TIEMEBBEIMME The full text of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR® is now available on-line as AMSPEC in the NEWS library of LEXIS•NEXIS...
...Meanwhile, the covert U.S...
...The whole point of Whitewater, in fact, is that it already has...
...The historic significance of Whitewater now lies in the extent to which the mid-term elections will become a referendum on the abuse of one-party rule...
...Voters in November will have the chance to avert one-party rule by the simple means of replacing the Democratic majority in the House and Senate with a Republican one...
...Leach himself demonstrated the valueof two-party congressional oversight...
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...H ouse Banking Committee chairman Henry Gonzalez has refused for nearly a year and a half to hold oversight hearings on the Resolution Trust Corporation, the clean-up agency for the savings and loan crisis, even though he wrote the law requiring oversight hearings every six months...
...It wouldn't take long for the federal government to degenerate into the kind of corrupt one-party state found in, say, Arkansas...
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...Or, as he put it, the issue was "a collusive effort by the majority party in the Congress to aid and abet the executive branch in its concerted effort to deny disclosure of information related to legitimate congressional oversight...
...and we will pay shipping and handling...
...But at the end of September Leach's pro bono lawyers, from the firm Covington and Burling, announced they would file an appeal, heading the case toward a major Supreme Court decision...
...Nixon relied on White House bunglers like the Plumbers precisely because he felt the career bureaucracy would resist performing illegal errands...
...Watergate achieved mythic status not as a burglary but as an attempt by the executive branch to usurp powers...
...But George Bush went virtually unscathed for bending the rules to make loans to Iraq, even though, in what the French would call a grande scan-dale, some of the funds may have financed the Scuds that killed dozens of Americans...
...financing of Iraq in the 1980s failed to arouse comparable public anger, even though the bungling led to a war and loss of American lives...
...It's appropriate that the RTC and House Banking are leading the decline...
...Leach charged that this stonewall appeared to originate in the White House...
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...The party that controlled both Congress and the presiden...
...In spite of the rebuff from Gonzalez, he took the RTC to federal court to shake loose the Madison documents...
...When Gonzalez abruptly canceled the Whitewater hearing scheduled for March 24, Leach took his evidence to the public in a sober but riveting floor statement...
...A series of bad bills in the early eighties opened the thrift industry to shady characters, including Bill Clinton's friend and mentor, James McDougal...
...He instructed the RTC not to cooperate with Leach, the ranking Republican on his committee...
...senators who had bullied regulators on behalf of S&L crook Charles Keating, Jr...
...One aspect of Whitewater threatens to put it up there with Watergate...
...His 1989 hearings were the first to expose the five U.S...
...Like the Constitution itself, it ultimately rests on the popular will...
...On a parallel track, Leach's allies on the Government Operations Committee are invoking a lesser-known rule peculiar to that committee by which any seven members can petition an agency in its jurisdiction to release documents...
...The district court ruled against him, on the grounds that the conduct of Congress is a political question, not subject to court review...
...The ambiguous outcome resulted in part from a popular suspicion that Congress, in an attempt to micro-manage foreign affairs had itself overstepped its proper powers...
...One of the foundations of American government is House Rule X and its Senate equivalent, which requires a congressional committee to hold "continuing review" of the way federal agencies carry out the laws in the committee's jurisdiction...
...CI The American Spectator November 1994...
...Rather than cure the problem when it reached a crisis, House and Senate leaders used their leverage to protect their shady friends, and the Republican White House yielded readily...
...Chairman Gonzalez set an even more dangerous precedent...
...The more obvious candidate for an award for political valor would be Jim Leach...
...As Iowa Rep...
...In any event, the strongest defense of Checks and Balances can't come from the courts, one of the players in the system...
...Loaded with fascinating historical information as well as upcoming events and Clinton quotes...
...It comes down to Checks and Balances, that chestnut of eighth-grade civics...
...This rule creates the famous "Iron Triangle" of committee chairman, senior bureaucrats, and special interest groups that gives an independent life to so many federal programs, but it's also the practical device that makes balanced government work...
...t's a sad reversal that chairman Gonzalez is the latest agent for the cover-up elite...
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...The most rotten spot in the federal government for years has been its handling of the savings and loan debacle...
...But this time, his committee majority blandly accepted a standard of conduct that not only facilitated political manipulation of thrift regulation but declared it to be ethical and proper...
Vol. 27 • November 1994 • No. 11
