Last Sunday President-elect Barack
Obama was asked whether he would
seek an investigation of possible crimes
by the Bush administration. “I don’t be-
lieve that anybody is above the law,” he
responded, but “we need to look for-
ward as opposed to looking backwards.”
I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an in-
quest into what happened during the
Bush years — and nearly everyone has
taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean
that we won’t — this means that those
who hold power are indeed above the
law because they don’t face any conse-
quences if they abuse their power.
Let’s be clear what we’re talking
about here. It’s not just torture and ille-
gal wiretapping, whose perpetrators
claim, however implausibly, that they
were patriots acting to defend the na-
tion’s security. The fact is that the Bush
administration’s abuses extended from
environmental policy to voting rights.
And most of the abuses involved using
the power of government to reward po-
litical friends and punish political ene-
mies.
At the Justice Department, for exam-
ple, political appointees illegally re-
served nonpolitical positions for “right-
thinking Americans” — their term, not
mine — and there’s strong evidence
that officials used their positions both to
undermine the protection of minority
voting rights and to persecute Demo-
cratic politicians.
The hiring process at Justice echoed
the hiring process during the occupa-
tion of Iraq — an occupation whose suc-
cess was supposedly essential to na-
tional security — in which applicants
were judged by their politics, their per-
__________
The price
we'll pay if we
don't look back.
__________
sonal loyalty to President Bush and, ac-
cording to some reports, by their views
on Roe v. Wade, rather than by their
ability to do the job.
Speaking of Iraq, let’s also not forget
that country’s failed reconstruction: the
Bush administration handed billions of
dollars in no-bid contracts to politically
connected companies, companies that
then failed to deliver. And why should
they have bothered to do their jobs?
Any government official who tried to
enforce accountability on, say, Hallibur-
ton quickly found his or her career de-
railed.
There’s much, much more. By my
count, at least six important govern-
ment agencies experienced major scan-
dals over the past eight years — in most
cases, scandals that were never prop-
erly investigated. And then there was
the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone
seriously doubt that the Bush adminis-
tration deliberately misled the nation
into invading Iraq?
Why, then, shouldn’t we have an offi-
cial inquiry into abuses during the Bush
years?
One answer you hear is that pursuing
the truth would be divisive, that it would
exacerbate partisanship. But if parti-
sanship is so terrible, shouldn’t there be
some penalty for the Bush administra-
tion’s politicization of every aspect of
government?
Alternatively, we’re told that we don’t
have to dwell on past abuses, because
we won’t repeat them. But no important
figure in the Bush administration, or
among that administration’s political al-
lies, has expressed remorse for break-
ing the law. What makes anyone think
that they or their political heirs won’t do
it all over again, given the chance?
In fact, we’ve already seen this mov-
ie. During the Reagan years, the Iran-
contra conspirators violated the Consti-
tution in the name of national security.
But the first President Bush pardoned
the major malefactors, and when the
White House finally changed hands the
political and media establishment gave
Bill Clinton the same advice it’s giving
Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie.
Sure enough, the second Bush adminis-
tration picked up right where the Iran-
contra conspirators left off — which
isn’t too surprising when you bear in
mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some
of those conspirators.
Now, it’s true that a serious investiga-
tion of Bush-era abuses would make
Washington an uncomfortable place,
both for those who abused power and
those who acted as their enablers or
apologists. And these people have a lot
of friends. But the price of protecting
their comfort would be high: If we
whitewash the abuses of the past eight
years, we’ll guarantee that they will
happen again.
Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while
it’s probably in his short-term political
interests to forgive and forget, next
week he’s going to swear to “preserve,
protect, and defend the Constitution of
the United States.” That’s not a condi-
tional oath to be honored only when it’s
convenient.
And to protect and defend the Consti-
tution, a president must do more than
obey the Constitution himself; he must
hold those who violate the Constitution
accountable. So Mr. Obama should re-
consider his apparent decision to let the
previous administration get away with
crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a
decision he has the right to make.
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