House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should not have to use or lose another brain cell trying to figure out how to deal with her "Bill Jefferson" problem, which may or may not also be a Congressional Black Caucus problem. The first black congressman elected from Louisiana since Reconstruction should just go, and let someone else represent the urgent interests of the mostly poor, mostly black people of New Orleans. He should spare both the Speaker and the CBC leadership the agony of trying to devise some kind of elaborate quarantine for him in order to avoid getting his slop all over them.
Jefferson, innocent until proven guilty, should go home and prepare his defense. He should let the Black Caucus off the hook, spared the anguish of having to defend him. What do I mean by "anguish"? A full day after the indictment, CBC Chairwoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, the Detroit Democrat, felt compelled to issue a statement in his defense.In its entirety it read:
While the charges against Congressman William Jefferson are gravely serious and warrant thorough deliberation, the law of the land entitles every citizen to presumed innocence until the court of law deems otherwise. Therefore, we trust the merits of the case against Congressman Jefferson will be examined in a court of law instead of the chambers of public opinion.Statements like that are, to be blunt, painfully lame, and the CBC should not be forced to make them, at a time when they and Democrats in general are trying to leverage the benefits of majority into real progress on any number of fronts, from ethics reform to ending the war in Iraq. Leave it to Jefferson to explain the bundles of cold hard cash found masquerading as frozen dinners in his freezer at home. He should spare his colleagues and his party the humiliation.
And what about Scooter Libby? Judge Reggie Walton, who sentenced Libby to two and a half years in prison -- longer than the time remaining on the Bush Administration clock, but not nearly as long as the war in Iraq has lasted -- noted that the jury had come to its conviction after careful deliberation. These guilty verdicts are not to be taken lightly. A pardon would clearly amount to a denigration of that careful work and demonstrate a deep disdain for the system of justice that the president has sworn to protect and defend.
But regarding this administration, it is fair to say that that train has already left the station. I direct your attention to, say, the multitude of signing statements that has accompanied so much of what the president has signed into law. I think it would be more clarifying -- and the perfect coda to the festival of hubris that got us into Iraq in the first place -- for the president to pardon Libby; that would at least make clear the poltical, ideological, and moral underpinnings of both the scandal and the war. Scooter Libby sitting in jail amounts to an awfully weak and diluted sort of consequence of the catastrophic U.S. involvement in Iraq. As the body count among both American and Iraqis continues to mount, and as the country finds itself locked in a debate about how to get out of Iraq, having Scooter in the slammer is, to say the least, insufficient to the historical scale of the calamity. I say let him go home.
I read with interest a column in The Washington Post by William Otis that suggests a path that would spare Libby his designated prison time, and spare the president the embarrassment of an outright pardon. Otis, a former federal prosecutor and special counsel to the first President Bush, thinks that the president should commute the sentence to no jail time, let the conviction stand, and let Libby pay his $250,000 fine. It's not fair, but I'd be fine with it.
A straight-out pardon would be preferable, in terms of having the president reveal his full, true colors. But in another sense it would actually require Bush administration officials involved to abandon their usual approach to issues of law and wrongdoing. Usually the convicted applicant must wait at least five years after his or her conviction before he is even eligible for a pardon. More importantly, in the Justice Department guidelines for pardons under a section headed, "Acceptance of responsibility, remorse, and atonement," it states that the clemency applicant must be seeking "forgiveness rather than vindication."
This is a path that, obviously, both Libby and Jefferson should strongly consider. Regarding the selling of the Iraq war and so much more, it's above all else the path the president should take. But don't hold your breath.
