Independent Counsel Law’s Quiet Death

Kenneth W. Starr may go out with a bang, but the law that sent him in pursuit of President Clinton is expiring without so much as a whimper.

The independent counsel act lapses in 10 days, unmentioned and unmourned, the debate about extending it over, probably before it began. Versions of it have been in effect for two decades. There have been at least 21 special prosecutors under its terms, an approximate count because some cases were sealed and secret.

Starr’s five-year investigation, expanded from a failed land deal to the sex scandal that led to the impeachment of the president, is going to keep going, though.

The law provides that he can continue past its expiration, until he decides his tasks are done. That applies to four other independent counsels as well. Another, into influence peddling in the Department of Housing and Urban Development back when Republicans ran it, shut down early this month, after nine years in operation.

Dragging investigations, disputed findings, failed prosecutions and politics all figured in the consensus to let the law run out June 30.

Starr himself said it should. He said it was supposed to take the politics out of law enforcement and prosecution, but “sometimes has the ironic effect of further politicizing it.”

That was a point of rare agreement between Starr and the Clinton administration. There were Senate and House hearings earlier this year on rewriting and extending the law, but the outcome was obvious then.

Republicans were burned by the system in the Iran-Contra case, when the independent counsel got a former secretary of Defense indicted and issued a report damaging then-President George Bush just before the 1992 election he lost to Clinton.

That led Republicans in the then-Democratic Senate to block renewal of the law for 18 months. After it went back onto the books, with Clinton’s backing, the president and his administration became the target of seven independent counsel investigations.

And Clinton hasn’t heard the last of them. Starr says he isn’t sure how much longer he will need to complete the investigations that have embroiled the White House. His last act will be a final report, and that could include assertions of wrongs by the president and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Starr’s volumes of evidence against Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair, and his recommendations for impeachment charges, were sent to the House as the 1998 congressional election campaign season began. Republicans tried to make Clinton an issue, but it didn’t work. Democrats gained House seats despite it all.

When renewal of the law was being debated, Starr said that any independent counsel is subject to political attack, and it would be better to put the responsibility for investigating allegations of wrongdoing by people at the top of government back in the hands of the Justice Department, where it used to be.

That way, the attorney general would be in charge, with Congress overseeing what’s done. That’s the way it worked before 1978. When there were outside prosecutors--and there had been only five--they were chosen by attorneys general, usually because of congressional and political pressure.

Richard M. Nixon accepted one as the price of getting his attorney general confirmed by the Senate. When he fired the first Watergate prosecutor for pressing subpoenas against the White House, the uproar forced him to accept a second one, and he was on the path toward resigning to avoid impeachment.

Clinton yielded to political pressure when he had the first Whitewater prosecutor appointed by the Justice Department; the law was not in effect at the time. When it was revived, a panel of federal judges installed Starr to take over the case.

The rest, as the cliche goes, is history. So is the law.