Dick Morris
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com --
EVER
since President Dwight Eisenhower first made modern
use of the “doctrine” of executive privilege
to keep loyalty/security data out of the hands of Sen.
Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), the idea has been a non-starter.
It
remains the political equivalent of Saddam Hussein telling
arms inspectors, “Look anywhere you want, but not
in the green tent.” Its assertion guarantees that
congressional committees, newspapers, scandalmongers
and the average man and woman in the street will want
nothing more than to look in the green tent.
Doubtless,
from where Vice President Richard Cheney sits, the congressional
inquiry into Enron and the decisionmaking process of
his energy task force seems like a Rep. Henry Waxman
(D-Calif.) fishing expedition. The vice president probably
takes umbrage at his privacy being invaded by the committee.
To him, it probably is as simple a matter as when Secretary
of State Henry Stimson closed down his department’s
code-breaking activity in 1929 with a haughty, “Gentlemen
do not read each other’s mail.”
But
to the rest of us, his use of executive privilege to
hide documents related to this bankruptcy and the fraud
surrounding it is like a red, blinking neon sign with
an arrow pointed to the White House that flashes on
and off saying “guilty,” “guilty,”
“guilty.”
This
is perhaps the only aspect in which George Bush’s
White House is copying something from his predecessor.
It’s a bad place to start. As with Bill Clinton,
if Cheney and Bush act guilty and look guilty and conceal
documents as though they were guilty, we will all grow
to assume that they are guilty. Even though, in this
case, they likely are not.
With
Bush’s Enron connections making him vulnerable
to this scandal’s fallout, it is the height of
irresponsibility, self-involvement and downright pigheadedness
for Cheney to insist that his privacy need be protected.
Congressional
committees always get what they want in the end. The
play out of this squabble over documents is numbingly
predictable. After several weeks of bad publicity, during
which more and more of the public will come to feel
that Bush and Cheney have something to hide, the administration
will yield to the public pressure and release the documents
as requested.
As we have seen the Nazi torturer say in countless grade-B World War II movies, “They all talk in the end.”
BAN STUDENT VISAS
The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
announcement that it will take at least a year to tighten
controls on student visas to protect against terrorists
begs the basic question — why don’t we ban
the issuance of student visas for at least the next
year as the danger of terrorism swirls about us?
With
close to 600,000 foreigners in the United States on
student visas, it is time to reassure the American people
by cutting off the flow until we can make our country
secure against terror. Let us all remember, vividly,
that it was Hani Hanjour who piloted a plane into the
Pentagon while he was here on a student visa.
Student
visas can become the new hot button political issue.
While colleges and universities want to continue to
collect tuition from these students — who comprise
about 4 percent of their total student population —
their narrow special interest should yield to the greater
national good.
It
is obvious that the agency cannot adequately police
or supervise those it admits on student visas, so it
makes eminent sense to curtail their issuance until
the immediate crisis has passed. Any “compromises”
that provide for some kind of certification that the
students are not terrorists are ridiculous. Does anyone
believe that the INS or any branch of the U.S. government
has enough information on which to base such a finding?
It
is not enough to ban student visas for those from nations
that sponsor terror. It is too easy for a “student”
to get around the requirement and enter through some
other country.
Academics,
interested in keeping their campuses full, will undoubtedly
argue that we need to expose students from other lands
to the American way of life. In a time of peace and
tranquility, the argument has much to commend it. But
we are very far away from that delightful situation.
With our nation under assault, we must take steps to
protect
JWR contributor Dick Morris is the author of, among others, The New Prince. Comment by clicking here.
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