This is what John McCain's going with these days. It is intriguing that the corollary to this is that Bush is the Nixon equivalent. But I think we need to rethink Jerry Ford's "brave decision" which was, essentially, a terrible decision that might have been satisfying on some sort of emotional level for a weary country but isn't defensible on any sort of principle.
Look, it's pretty simple to me: someone breaks the law, regardless of who they are, and they ought to get punished. Richard Nixon betrayed the public trust that was invested in him upon his election as president. Losing his office is something that should have happened without question. And since he committed crimes, he should have had to answer for them in the way that civilized societies usually do: in a court of law. Not just in the history books. Nixon's trip to China is grist for judgment in the history books, but his flaunting of the nation's laws is something else entirely. It wasn't a thing for future generations to decide, like Truman's firing of Douglas MacArthur or LBJ's signing of the Civil Rights Act. It was something that ought to have been decided at the time, once and for all. Someone who robs a bank doesn't entreat the judge to let history decide his fate.
Now, I'm not naive enough to believe that everyone gets a fair shake in the justice system. Even if Nixon were to have been on trial, he would have been able to afford excellent attorneys and might well have beaten the case. Such is life, and that would have been bad, but acceptable. At least with a trial there would have been the possibility of justice. But Ford's pardon--whether done out of political expediency, payback, political self-interest or a sincere desire to get past what Ford must have assumed was a one-time nightmare--has turned out to be blindingly stupid. What he no doubt didn't count on was that Nixon wasn't a pariah to everyone--a lot of movement conservatives thought Nixon didn't really do much that was wrong, and as Jane Mayer's The Dark Side tells us, conservative think tanks had decided by the the early 1980s that they actually liked a lot of Nixon's ideas on presidential power. Ford didn't know, nor could he have known, that a lot of Nixon's antidemocratic notions would become mainstays of the right, and he was apparently not smart enough to realize that this nation wasn't founded on the notion of deference and goodwill toward those in power, and that letting a nauseating group of people get away with an inch means that an even more nauseating group will try to get away with a foot later on. Jerry Ford wasn't a bad guy--he just wasn't sufficiently farsighted (or cynical).
Seriously, does anyone think that not bringing the Bush Administration to bear for its manifold violations of the law think that that's going to be the end of this garbage? It just means that in eight, or twelve, or however many years, the right is going to be up to the same shenanigans. Most of them don't feel that spying on citizens without warrants or torture are bad at all, and most still feel that Bush did a good job of "keeping us safe", which is not to mention that elite opinion among conservatives is even more in favor of Bushery. The corrupt sewer of D.C. opinion seems to want to revive Fordism, and just sweep things under the rug to avoid facing difficult questions. They are, however, questions that have never been definitively answered, which is why they keep popping up, and will until we finally answer them irrefutably.
And the main question is pretty simple: are we a nation ruled by the laws, or by the whims of whatever person finds himself (or herself) in the Oval Office? It really is that simple. We're back to debating the divine right of kings, only in different language. Contra this, I don't think that human progress is a myth so much as a house of cards, one which you have to constantly watch because it is so very fragile. Humans are compelled by some vicious and neanderthal urges but also by some noble and civilizing urges, and the trick is to find balance and achieve progress. To this end we create institutions to police the baser elements of human nature. What happened in this country is that we just assumed that our institutions--as designed by the framers--were impervious to rot. The genius of the framers, though, is rather overrated. They had some sound observations and some good ideas, but also a lot of terrible ideas (the electoral college) whose day, if it ever occurred, has long since passed. The framers did forsee the problem of power being accumulated in too few people, and we just figured that we were done with all that nonsense. What one saw during the Bush years was an advanced form of decay--mostly on the right but also on the left as well. The idea that humans can invent an institution to stop decay is ridiculous, largely because humans are imperfect, as are the systems we create. They will be tested and eventually found wanting. The only way to make an experiment like America work is if the little-l liberal values upon which the country is based are broadly shared--and this has turned out to be not so much the case. The Bush years have brought on the inevitable--though not irrevocable--backsliding and decay, which is depressing but also invaluable as a lesson to avoid further complacency.
In the end, this is all just a reminder that the only way to keep civilization working is through the hard and unpopular slog of watching, waiting, and acting against those that would destroy it, inadvertently or otherwise. This is why Gerald Ford is wrong, it's why John McCain is wrong, and it's why Politician X in 2024 will be wrong. They're wrong for the same reason the person before them was wrong. The cycle will continue, what has happened before will happen again, and as there seems to be little appetite among the political elite to push the matter of justice forward, we're merely postponing the inevitable struggle. And all the while we're getting morally weaker. In 1974 even most Republican congresspeople supported impeaching Nixon. This year there aren't even too many Democrats willing to take Bush to task. It all becomes abstract, all about power, and the nation's moral bearings take another beating. I don't think it'll be this way forever, but eventually it has to come to a stop, doesn't it?
P.S. The argument that this will mean that every administration will prosecute its predecessor strikes me as a feature of Bush prosecutions, not a bug. I want that threat to be real--I want Barack Obama and all his successors to be so afraid of torture that they are superultracareful about following the law at all times. This is how civilized societies are supposed to work.
