It Still Rings True: No Man Is Above Law

It’s time for a pop quiz: Why is William Jefferson Clinton appearing before a federal grand jury Monday? Criminal investigation, you say? Try again. The correct answer is: Bigotry against the state of Arkansas.

“I think a lot of this is prejudice against our state,” America’s First Wife told an Arkansas newspaper last week. “They wouldn’t do this if we were from some other state.” Whoever killed Roger Rabbit also must have offed the “vast right-wing conspiracy”--doubtlessly explaining why Hillary Rodham Clinton has scouted out this new persecutor.

It’s quite possible Mrs. C’s analysis was emboldened by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday, on which the two Watergate reporters wailed about the dangers of investigating this president. Woodward intoned that, “We have to step back . . . because we’re all paying the price. The government can’t function.” Bernstein appeared to have sipped a tad more caffeine before the show as he elevated the grand jury’s inquiries to “a kind of Nuremberg prosecution for [Nazi] war crimes and you end up with a jaywalking offense.”

Mrs. Clinton is given to such bizarre ruminations because she is flailing to save what’s left of her husband’s presidency. And the ludicrous overstatement of Woodstein (as they were called in their glory days) is surely grounded in their fear that the deconstruction of Bill Clinton also dilutes their legacy, which largely depends on no other president being impeached.

What the president’s wife and Woodstein conveniently overlook is how they helped create this political Godzilla. Hillary Rodham was an ambitious staff lawyer on the House Impeachment Committee in 1974. Woodward and Bernstein were ambitious reporters on the journalistic make. They joined a legion of others to raise in neon lights on our national marquee an aphorism which defines our democracy: “No man is above the law.”

When people warned in 1973 and 1974 that the government couldn’t function, that impeachment was frightening, that a national obsession had taken hold--there was a simple answer: No man is above the law. The frenzied chasers of those days--the reporters, the prosecutors, the congressional investigators--used as their sword and shield the sanctity of law and its fair application to all regardless of station.

This operating premise did not merely guide thoughtful citizens concerned about abuses of power but gave cover as well to the Vietnam sellouts, McGovernite wackos, and ill-willed Democrats who wanted to make partisan road-kill of their political adversaries.

* These are the very last words in Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski’s best-selling memoir: “. . . during the Watergate years [our Constitution] was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one--absolutely no one--is above the law.”

* The judicial hero of Watergate, U.S. District Judge John J. Sirica, used his book to observe: “. . . it is our faith and trust in the law, our devotion to the notion that ours should be a government of laws and not men, that saved us from this scandal.”

* And in their book, “The Final Days,” Woodstein themselves approvingly quoted Hillary Rodham’s then-boss, House Judiciary Chairman Peter Rodino: “I as chairman have been guided by a simple principle that the law must deal fairly with every man. . . .”

A nation legitimately might ask: How can Bill and Hillary Clinton--who emerged on the public landscape athwart the political corpses of Richard Nixon and his men--claim immunity from the clutches of the standard that they and their ilk raised with such righteousness?

The law proscribing perjury--in the current instance intended to protect the rights of a young woman seeking redress from a powerful boss who allegedly exposed himself to her--is now claimed by Clinton sycophants to be a law meriting violation. No other conclusion can be drawn than that the defenders of Monday’s grand jury witness believe the Paula Corbin Jones/Monica Lewinsky matter to be a case where man is greater than the law--notwithstanding Messrs. Jaworski, Sirica and Rodino.

It is yet to be seen how the ghosts of Watergate past are exorcised and how, in the case of Clinton, it can be asserted that America might sometimes--on certain occasions for certain privileged people and under the right circumstances--be a government of men, not laws.

Unfortunately for the Clintons, that won’t even sell in Arkansas.

Kenneth L. Khachigian is a veteran political strategist and former White House speech writer who practices law in Orange County. His column appears here every other week.