Clinton Turns Yellow
By Jacob
Weisberg
(I,531 words; posted
Friday, Oct. 25; to be composted Friday, Nov. 1)
In a small office in the
West Wing of the White House, next to Press Secretary Mike McCurry, sits an
intense, wiry political operative named Rahm Emanuel. Though he is not among
President Clinton's best-known advisers, Emanuel may be the administration's
most diabolically effective tactician. On the issue of crime, in which he
mostly specializes, Emanuel has gotten celebrated victims like James Brady and
Marc Klaas to appear in Democratic TV spots. He is also largely responsible for
moving the Clinton campaign beyond mere "rapid response" to pre-emptive
strikes--engineering, for instance, Clinton's endorsement by the Fraternal
Order of Police on the day Bob Dole was set to launch a major attack on the
president's crime record.
So it wasn't hard to guess
the origin of the president's latest "little things" proposal: to require drug
testing of teen-agers who want a driver's license. Dole's attack on Clinton for
presiding over an increase in drug use by young people had the potential to
bite; by tossing out the drug-testing idea, Clinton could claim to be doing
something about the problem. "Our message should be simple," Clinton said in
his Saturday radio address. "No drugs or no driver's license."
Clinton's "simple" proposal
might be better described as simple-minded, not to mention impractical,
useless, and offensive to notions of privacy and constitutional rights. But the
truth is that though Emanuel pushed the proposal--along with domestic policy
adviser Bruce Reed--it can't be blamed on advisers, or even laid at the
doorstep of "election-year politics." No one had to work very hard to talk
Clinton into accepting yet another abridgment of individual freedom for the
sake of political expediency. What the drug-testing proposal should remind us
is not just that Clinton is an opportunist, who, with a 20-point lead, is now
pandering beyond the call of victory. It should also put us on our guard about
a man who, if he is a liberal at all, is a liberal of an odd sort: One with no
instinctive regard for civil liberties or the Bill of Rights.
Clinton's abysmal record
on liberty goes back to his days as governor of Arkansas. The low moment was in
1989, when, under no pressure from anyone, he proposed a law to ban
"desecration" of both the American and Arkansas flags. "It was totally
gratuitous," says Joseph Jacobson, who was director of the state chapter of the
American Civil Liberties Union at the time. Under a then-recent Supreme Court
decision, "It wasn't even in doubt that it was unconstitutional." Clinton
seemed more First Amendment-friendly after he was elected president, when he
reversed himself and opposed amending the Constitution to ban flag burning. But
that stance turned out to be a false positive for the president on civil
liberties. Since then he has consistently insulted both the First and the
Fourth amendments. (Some would say he has disregarded the Second Amendment,
too. But that's a different discussion.)
Clinton's First Amendment slovenliness first
became apparent in 1993, when he boxed his own solicitor general on the ears
for having been on the wrong side in the Knox case, in which a graduate student
at the University of Pennsylvania was convicted for possessing videotapes of
teen-age girls wearing bikinis and underwear. When the Supreme Court overturned
the graduate student's conviction, Clinton joined in the chorus condemning the
court's decision.
You might grant Clinton that
one as a necessary surrender--no politician in his right mind wants to be
allied with child pornographers. But what Clinton did on the Communications
Decency Act is truly unforgivable. When Sen. James Exon of Nebraska introduced
a foolish bill which would have criminalized the transmission of "indecent" or
"patently offensive" material via the Internet, the administration backed
it.
It was Republicans, more
than Democrats, who tried unsuccessfully to derail the CDA in Congress. One
oddity of this political moment is that while our Democratic president has no
special love of civil liberties, civil libertarian sentiment is growing in the
unlikely soil of the GOP--where vilification of the American Civil Liberties
Union has been campaign boilerplate, at least until recently. This surprising
development is partly a matter of pandering to anti-government paranoids in the
gun lobby and militia movement; partly anti-Clinton opportunism; partly
explained, at least in the CDA case, by the interests of business; but partly,
perhaps, principled.
In the CDA debate, Republican Rep. Christopher
Cox of California led the push for an alternative; both Newt Gingrich and
Majority Leader Dick Armey supported Cox's position. But it was left to a
three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals panel in Philadelphia to throw out the law,
calling it "profoundly repugnant." Did Clinton learn his lesson? Hardly. The
administration is appealing the decision to the Supreme Court. And Clinton
recently signed an immigration bill giving the government the power to exclude
anyone who advocates "terrorist activity." This threatens to become a modern
version of the McCarran-Walter Act, which was used during the Cold War to
exclude lefty writers and intellectuals.
On Fourth Amendment rights,
Clinton has been no better. In his crime bill, passed in 1994, he went further
than any Republican president would have dared to restrict habeas corpus, the
writ by which state prisoners, including those on death row, can get their
cases reviewed by federal courts. Under the immigration bill, Clinton directed
the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport asylum seekers without
giving them any opportunity to appear before a tribunal. And in his most recent
anti-terrorism proposal, which he tried to wing through Congress in the wake of
the TWA 800 disaster, Clinton requested vast new wiretapping powers for the
FBI. Once again, it was primarily a few liberty-loving Republicans who
restrained him.
The drug-testing
proposal may be Clinton's most obnoxious gesture of all. In the other
instances, there is at least a trade-off posited between individual rights and
competing public purposes, like the protection of children. In the case of drug
testing, however, the proposed warrantless blanket invasions of privacy serve
only a symbolic value. A scheduled drug test is easily beaten; you just need to
stay clean for a short time before the test. Then you can celebrate your
license by getting high. In answer to the objection that urine tests reveal
only very recent use of hard drugs, Bruce Reed says that before long,
drug-testing technology will have advanced from urine to hair tests, which may
reveal chemical traces for up to a year. But here the insult to civil liberties
becomes staggering. The explicit purpose becomes finding out who among the
young has ever indulged in the kind of experiment that both members of
the Democratic ticket have acknowledged participating in themselves. Clinton
made this purpose clear in his speech Thursday at Birmingham Southern College,
where he said the reason for the tests was to "to find those kids and help them
before they're in trouble and it's too late."
That Clinton simply has no conception of why
such an intrusion might be worrisome was evident from that speech, as it was
from his radio address, in which he compared his proposal to the requirement
that parolees take drug tests. Parolees are convicted criminals. People
applying for driver's licenses aren't even suspects of anything. It has been
suggested that Clinton limited his idea to under-18s in order to affront only
people who cannot vote. The more likely reason, however, is that if the idea is
ultimately judged constitutional--a big if--this will only be because it
applies to those who do not have the full legal rights of adults.
On top of this sorry
civil-liberties record are the misuse of the FBI in the White House's own
original travel-office investigation, and what has come to be known as
Filegate. No one has yet traced these abuses to the president himself. But
there is something to the argument that his cavalier attitude about individual
rights helped to create an atmosphere in which thuggish members of his
administration could regard invasions of privacy very lightly. Dole is hardly
better than Clinton when it comes to the Bill of Rights, and there are lots of
Republicans, like Bob Barr of Georgia, who decry only those incursions that
perturb the National Rifle Association. But if Clinton sets the new Democratic
standard, the day may not be far off when some Democratic candidate accuses a
Republican opponent of being a card-carrying member of the ACLU--and the
Republican proudly admits it.
