Can the Independent Counsel Statute Be Saved?

The independent counsel provisions of the Ethics in Government Act face an uncertain future. Harriger argues that the statute in its current form meets virtually none of the goals Congress intended in 1978 and that the statute should be substantially revised in an effort to minimize the costs and maximize the benefits

The History of the Independent Counsel Provisions: How the Past Informs the Current Debate

The current feeding frenzy around the campaign finance scandal invites us to reflect upon the importance of the past. The independent counsel provisions of the Ethics in Government Act are the product of a particular time and sequence of events that determined their shape and continue to influence their implementation. If we want to understand the current controversy surrounding Attorney General Janet Reno\u27s interpretation of the independent counsel provisions, we must look back at the legislative history of those provisions and the larger history of the time. When we look back, we can see that the issues at the center of the debate about the provisions today were there from the start. The difficult choices that faced the lawmakers then are no less difficult today. In response to the Watergate scandal, Congress sought to write a constitutional statute that balanced the competing values of independence and accountability in a political climate of deep partisan and public distrust. Could Congress create an officer independent of the executive branch without running afoul of the constitutional scheme of separation of powers? Would an officer wielding prosecutorial power independent of the executive branch be an unaccountable persecutor of vulnerable public officials? Could Congress create an arrangement that removed politics from the consideration of criminal allegations against executive branch officers? Could an independent counsel arrangement help restore public confidence in government in the wake of Watergate? The question we must ask ourselves today is not whether Congress could or should have come up with different answers then but whether twenty years later, in a political environment even more steeped in distrust, we can imagine any other balance among these interests. In this Article, I use the history of the independent counsel provisions to frame the current controversies surrounding the arrangement. I begin with a brief discussion of the uses of special prosecution arrangements prior to Watergate, followed by a fuller discussion of the influence of the Watergate scandal on the creation of the 1978 provisions. After an exploration of the various issues debated by Congress before passage of the provisions, I consider the way in which the implementation of the Act shaped the debates at each consecutive reauthorization in 1982, 1987, and 1994. Finally, I return to the present, linking this history with the current controversies about the Attorney General\u27s discretion, the independent counsel\u27s independence, and the alternatives to the independent counsel in a climate of distrust

Political Science and the Work of Democracy

The study of democratic theory and democratic politics is at the core of the discipline of political science. Yet the very centrality of democracy to the discipline may be what makes it difficult to sort out whether political science is doing the work of democracy rather than simply the analysis of it. Political science’s origins were civic minded but it has evolved into a more professionalized observer of politics than a promoter or creator of democracy. Nonetheless, in recent years there has been, as in many disciplines, a renewed interest in the civic component of our work and a challenge to the dominant paradigms of disinterested analysis and formal modeling. There are promising developments in political science that are contributing to the deliberative democracy “movement,” both in research and pedagogy