War, as Clausewitz said, is the continuation of politics by other means, but what happens when you live in a country whose opposing factions no longer take up arms against each other? Law becomes the battlefield, and its weird nooks and crannies become the terrain where the battle is fought. And the media become the central weapon of a war of attrition, in which shots are fired whose purpose is not to destroy, but to wear down, to demoralize, and to humiliate. We don’t exile great men with whom we have profound differences to far-distant islands. No, we try to exile them from government buildings — unless, that is, those buildings happen to be jails.
This is the only way to understand the woes besetting Newt Gingrich right now. For 25 years, Democrats and liberals have used a set of ethics rules and laws they created (and reserve the right to amend at any time) as a partisan tool against Republicans and conservatives. When Republicans ran the executive branch, the Democratic ethics regime was ruthless and remorseless in pursuit of them through independent counsels and congressional committees. Some crimes were indeed committed, for example at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But when there was no crime, nor even a violation of ethics, new violations were quickly dreamed up to make it look as though there were. Remember the “appearance of a conflict of interest,” a category that, by its very name, admitted that there was no offense?
Now, with Republicans in control of the Congress, the Democrats have brilliantly shifted focus. Using a process that Newt Gingrich himself deployed to nail real, honest-to-God violations of ethics — Jim Wright’s skirting the law by getting outrageous royalties on a so-called book, the conversion of the House bank and House post office into check-kiting and money-skimming playgrounds — they began a war of attrition with Gingrich’s rise to power in 1995 that has now broken out into total war. The problem is that this warfare, in the Congress at least, has been one-sided.
It is time for the Republicans to fight back, and the battle plan should be simple: tit for tat. Democrats file an ethics charge, Republicans file an ethics charge. Democrats call for a special counsel on the slightest pretext, Republicans do the same. If a Republican is going to have to pay $ 250,000 in legal fees defending himself against mendacious allegations, so should a Democrat. If the Republican leader in the House is going to find himself perpetually distracted and demoralized by legal consultations and news stories, so too should the Democratic leader in the House. Dick Gephardt, by the way, owns a summer home more expensive than it would appear he can afford, while David Bonior kept a girlfriend on his payroll until he married her. Sounds like things that need to be looked into, don’t you think?
Let’s assume that what Gephardt and Bonior did was perfectly kosher and that the ethics charges against them have no merit. All the more reason for a tit-for-tat strategy, since the Democratic ethics assault on Gingrich has been utterly without merit. Only the fact that the Democratic leadership and their friends in the media seem to think Newt Gingrich belongs in jail, solely for the crime of being Newt Gingrich, spares them from the charge of contemptible mendacity and outrageous opportunism. But precisely because they actually believe in what they’re doing, they ought to be punished for it so that they learn never to do it again. The only way to end an unjust war is to engage, to repel the attacker and put him back in a box so that he no longer violates basic standards of decency and civil behavior.
In two years’ time, the Democrats in the House have generated 74 separate ethics charges against Newt Gingrich. Two of those charges — two of 74! — now threaten his political career. Since there is such high dudgeon in the media about what Gingrich actually did wrong, let’s spell out the specifics. In two letters, he said his political action committee had no role in promoting the college course he taught. That was untrue, but there was nothing remotely illegal about GOPAC’s relation to “Renewing American Civilization.” The ethics committee said Gingrich should have consulted a tax lawyer — but a tax lawyer couldn’t have helped. Only a savvy political consultant or a Nostradamus could have foreseen a time when a) Gingrich would be speaker and b) a Democratic minority would be out for his blood. If you go looking for criminal behavior in the actions of any man, as King Lear saw, ” who should ‘scape whipping?'”
The tit-for-tat strategy offers a way out of the ethics morass, because it will affect the politics of Washington in the same way the independent- counsel statute has. The unjust persecution and prosecution of scores of Reagan and Bush administration officials (among them, full disclosure requires me to state, my brother-in-law Elliott Abrams) brought not a peep of protest from Democrats or the mainstream media. But now that the Clintonites have fallen prey to an independent counsel, suddenly it’s no longer out of bounds to question the ethics regime’s effect on the executive branch of government. This is a bit galling to many of us, since it is yet another example of the ways the media seem systematically to dehumanize people with whom they disagree yet proffer heartfelt sympathy to those they support. It is also galling because the charges being investigated by Kenneth Starr, for one, are far more serious and far more deserving of careful pursuit than anything Lawrence Walsh looked into.
But somehow, we always understood that only when Democrats felt the sting as badly as Republicans would we be able to find common ground in the dismantling of the ethics regime — that only when they sued for peace would peace be possible.
The same is true of the ethics regime in Congress. There is nothing more contemptible than using the law as a partisan weapon, not only because there is no real means of appeal but because such behavior devalues law itself. The only way to stop the manipulation of the law for unjust ends is to turn its full force on the manipulators. When they feel the sting of fire, when they have to suffer what Gingrich has suffered, they may call for a truce.
By John Podhoretz
