INDEPENDENT COUNSEL LAW WON'T BE MISSED

Last week a long-running farce called the independent counsel law expired. It won't be renewed, as America's 20-plus-year experiment in this constitutional hybrid goes the way of the dodo. Therein lies a tale.

The independent counsel law was a 1970s-era, post-Watergate creature of Washington's liberal reformers. An independent counsel was required, they instructed us, to investigate the appearance of impropriety in public officials because the Justice Department was headed by an attorney general who is appointed by the president. Such a politically appointed official could hardly be trusted with such investigative authority, they told us, and so we must have this new creature called an IC. That we had had the Justice Department performing this role for 200 years mattered not at all to them.

So we had independent counsels. Among the first to have an IC sicced on him was Carter administration hotshot Hamilton Jordan for ... who in the world can remember what? The last generation has seen so many of these ICs -- the Clinton administration alone has approached double figures -- that most Americans just tune out. Throughout the Reagan and Bush years, liberal Washington, and especially those in the heart of liberal power -- the U.S. Congress -- delighted as ICs were turned loose to hound hapless executive-branch officials. Former Attorney General Ed Meese had one, and media luminaries helped to ruin his reputation, only to have the IC, finally and at length, refuse to bring any charge. Other Reagan-Bush officials were bankrupted by the legal fees they incurred in defending themselves.

Throughout all this, no liberal or Democrat ever complained. Some keen observers opined at the time that it would take a Democratic president subjected to the same treatment before Washington could again agree that this IC business must end. But as long as Americans installed only Republicans in the White House, ICs were just fine with the media/Democratic establishment.

Most conservatives consistently decried the IC law, agreeing with Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court's most conservative member. Scalia was the lone member of the high court, a few years back, to vote to declare the whole thing unconstitutional. His lonely dissent is a piece of prophetic eloquence: "How terrifying it must be," Scalia wrote, "to have a constitutional officer called into being, with all the limitless resources of the federal government and with all its investigative powers, who has nothing to do but rummage through the details of your life ... " until he finds some crime with which to charge you.

Through all the warnings issued by conservatives and constitutional scholars such as Scalia, liberals remained blithely unconcerned, cheering the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the law. In 1994, passed by a Democratic Congress over Republican opposition, President Clinton signed the re-issuance of the IC law amid cheers from Janet Reno and the usual liberal quarters in the media.

And then came the IC experience of the last five years, in which ICs were turned loose on some Democrats in the executive branch. And that experience has prompted in Washington's liberals the revelation that the IC law is a bad thing. So official Washington -- and Janet Reno, and congressional liberals, and their allies in the national media -- now believe it should expire. So expire it did.

Until this administration leaves office, responsibility for investigating and prosecuting officials wrongdoing in the executive branch will reside in a Justice Department headed by Reno -- in itself a scary thought.

Imperfect though that is, this is where this power resided for 200 years. There it is accountable to the people through elections. And our nearly 25-year detour through unaccountable prosecutors is at an end.