Adscam shows system isn't working

WASHINGTON - President Richard M. Nixon today disbanded the Senate committee looking into Watergate, saying it had become a “partisan witch-hunt” and that committee chairman Sam Ervin (D - N.C.) had “clearly made up his mind” about the matter. The committee had been holding hearings into allegations of high-level involvement in illegal acts during the President’s 1972 re-election campaign, including the break-in at the Watergate complex in Washington D.C.
The President said the hearings had been “dragging on for months” and were “costing the taxpayer millions of dollars,” when everything that needed to be known about the Watergate affair had already been brought out.
In a separate development, the President’s legal team moved to have Federal District Judge John J. Sirica removed from the case of the seven alleged Watergate conspirators, saying the judge’s actions in issuing subpoenas for the so-called “Watergate tapes” showed he had “pre-determined the outcome of the case.” The President’s lawyers said the “straw that broke the camel’s back” was when Judge Sirica began asking witnesses provocative questions.

Well, no, it didn’t happen quite that way, did it? The President did not have the luxury of being able to disband inquiries that asked questions he did not like. He did not try to have Judge Sirica canned, nor did Nixon have the benefit of a cynical and compliant national press who treat every issue as a “game” between the “players.”
But now contrast what has been happening in Canada. The former Prime Minister presided over a government in which abuses of authority were commonplace, including his own involvement in the Business Development Bank file. In the particular example of the sponsorship scandal, the allegation is not that party funds were used improperly, as in Watergate, but public funds; and while the most serious part of Watergate was the attempt to obstruct the FBI in their investigation, in the sponsorship mess the RCMP were part of the scam.

Legal observers rated the President’s chances of forcing Judge Sirica’s recusal as remote.The move, rather, appeared part of a wide-ranging effort to discredit the judge. In a mimeographed circular popular with members of the media, former Nixon campaign operative Donald Segretti often refers to the trial as a “three-ring Siricas.”

Now the point here is not to claim that the sponsorship scandal was as bad as Watergate. The issue is: What if it had been? If Watergate ultimately showed that “the system worked,” Adscam is demonstrating in spades that, in Canada, the system doesn’t work. There is simply no way to hold a Prime Minister to account, certainly not while he is in office and it appears not even after. With the singular exception of the Auditor General, the institutions that we depend upon to see that the public interest is not abused -- a democratic Parliament, a professional civil service, a vigilant national press -- have been conspicuous by their absence.
This is hardly the first time, after all. The Somalia inquiry, the Krever commission, the APEC inquiry: all were either shut down or stonewalled by the Chretien government. The Shawinigan matter dragged on for years, thanks to the indifference of the media -- this paper excepted -- and the impotence of the opposition. Nobody paid the price, just as nobody was called to account for the broader abuses in the HRDC affair, the sponsorship scandal’s precursor and close cousin.

The President himself appeared to mock the judge’s inquiries. At the end of a lengthy press conference, he produced an audio tape from his briefcase, saying that if the judge was so interested in tape recordings, he had one he could give him. It was of his daughter, Tricia, singing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Media observers called the stunt a “number one hit,”saying the President had “played taps for the judge,” and “that’s the name of that tune.”
On a more serious note, the President insisted he had no personal knowledge of the break-in or subsequent cover-up, but that the Watergate affair had to be put in context. “I’m not a crook -- but if a few millions of dollars were paid out in hush money, how many more millions have been saved because we kept that lunatic McGovern out of the Oval Office?”

So now we are left with the Gomery inquiry. Imperfect as it is, imperfect as he is, Judge Gomery is our last hope. And the former Prime Minister’s men are doing their best to destroy him. The public vilification, the private whispers to the press, and now this phoney appeal to the Federal Court -- a case that has no legal merit whatever, but is designed solely for public consumption -- form part of a disturbing pattern of intimidation. Though they have not actually sent the RCMP to harass him, as they did to the former president of the BDC, it is the nearest thing to it.
There are laws about this sort of thing. Mr. Chretien is, if memory serves, a lawyer. So are many of his henchmen. I do not know what may be the practice in Quebec, but according to the rules of conduct of the Law Society of Upper Canada, while “proceedings and decisions of courts and tribunals are properly subject to scrutiny and criticism,” a lawyer has a special obligation to “avoid criticism that is petty, intemperate, or unsupported by a bona fide belief in its real merit...” More broadly, lawyers are not supposed to mock the courts, or recklessly impugn a judge’s impartiality.
I’d say golf balls and “Gomery Pyle” references would count, wouldn’t you?

Meanwhile, efforts began to impeach the President in the Senate. Political observers said Mr. Nixon appeared safe, given that every member of the Senate is appointed by the President...