The Opinionator

July 5, 2007, 5:41 pm
The Counterintuitive Commutation
By Chris Suellentrop
Tags: George Bush, Scooter Libby

Michael Kinsley and the editorial page of The Washington Times aren’t often in agreement. So it’s not exactly shocking that Kinsley and the newspaper differ on whether President Bush should have commuted Scooter Libby’s prison sentence. The surprise is that Kinsley’s in favor of commutation and The Washington Times is against it.

The commutation “is neither wise nor just,” the newspaper says in its editorial. “It is clearly within the president’s executive powers, but that is beside the point.” The editorial concludes:

Perjury is a serious crime. This newspaper argued on behalf of its seriousness in the 1990s, during the Clinton perjury controversy, and today is no different. We’d have hoped that more conservatives would agree. The integrity of the judicial process depends on fact-finding and truth-telling. A jury found Libby guilty of not only perjury but also obstruction [of] justice and lying to a grand jury. It handed down a very supportable verdict. This is true regardless of the trumped-up investigation and political witch hunt. It is true regardless of the unjustifiably harsh sentence.

Had Mr. Bush reduced Libby’s sentence to 15 months, we might have been able to support the decision. Alas, he did not.

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July 5, 2007, 9:42 am
The Laws of War
By Chris Suellentrop
Tags: holidays

On the Fourth of July, John Fabian Witt, a professor of law and history at Columbia, wrote on the op-ed page of The Washington Post that the Declaration of Independence “advanced an idea about war. The idea that war ought to be governed by law.” He writes of Thomas Jefferson’s message to King George III:

The climactic final charges, for which the rest were prologue, indicted the king for war crimes.

Britain’s navy, wrote Jefferson and the Congress, had “plundered our Seas,” while its armies had “ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.” Jefferson accused the British of employing legions of foreign mercenaries to commit acts of death and desolation “scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages,” acts unworthy of civilized nations. He charged British forces with taking Americans hostage and compelling them to bear arms against their own country. He and the Congress concluded their litany of war crimes by condemning the king’s two most fiendish offenses against the laws of war: inciting slave insurrections and encouraging attacks by “merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.”

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July 3, 2007, 4:22 pm
Libby’s Independence Day, Part 2
By Chris Suellentrop
Tags: George Bush, Scooter Libby

Here’s a conservative who’s against the commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence: Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher, who digs up a seemingly hypocritical quote from President Bush’s 1999 campaign biography, “A Charge to Keep.” In it, Bush wrote, “I don’t believe my role is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair.” Dreher writes on Crunchy Con, his Beliefnet blog:

I concede that it is possible that this prosecution ought not to have gone forward. But it did go forward, and Scooter Libby, in the judgment of the jury, deliberately lied under oath in an effort to obstruct justice. Perjury is always wrong, and deserving of punishment. But it is especially wrong when committed by a high-ranking government official. This is why I supported, and do support, the Clinton impeachment. And this is why I believe that Bush letting Libby off with a lighter sentence is corrosive and cynicism-producing: the president has said that lies under oath under these circumstances don’t really matter. Once again, we see that President Bush doesn’t really believe that accountability to the law or moral principles applies to his people. As a conservative, I find this dispiriting … but at this point, not the least bit surprising.

Libertarian Gene Healy of the Cato Institute says, at the Cato-at-liberty blog, that even if Scooter Libby deserved to have his sentence commuted, “What you cannot do – at least with a straight face – is argue that of the over 160,000 federal prisoners and thousands more awaiting sentencing, Scooter Libby was the most deserving of clemency.” Healy’s Cato colleague David Boaz provides President Bush with some additional suggestions, offered by Families Against Mandatory Minimums, for sentences in need of commutation. Among them: “Weldon Angelos –­ 55 years for minor marijuana and gun charges, causing the George W. Bush-appointed judge Paul Cassell, previously best known for pressing the courts to overturn the Miranda decision, to call the mandatory sentence in this case “unjust, cruel, and even irrational.”