Before the Senate voted this week to revive independent counsel investigations like the one into the Iran-Contra scandal, it did some long-overdue repair work on this much-abused device.
But more repairs are in order before the House of Representatives goes along with this move. Some of the improvements can easily be made by rewriting the proposed new law. Others, however, will require more self-control from Congress than it has shown so far.As this page has noted before, it's reasonable to retain the law authorizing independent counsels even though Congress let it expire last December. After all, the Justice Department can't investigate the White House without looking biased because the attorney general is appointed by and serves at the pleasure of the president.
But the outside investigations tend to drag on without producing many results in return for their high costs to the taxpayers. The one by Lawrence Walsh into Iran-Contra was particularly noxious, lasting seven years and costing $35 million without producing major convictions that lasted beyond appeal or pardon.
Yet this fiasco didn't keep Walsh from writing a final report that is said to claim the guilt of various Reagan administration officials, including some who were never formally charged.
In response, the Senate has rewritten the proposed new law to control the costs of independent counsel investigations, prevent future probers from claiming someone broke the law if that person was not indicted, and permit special prosecutors to investigate Congress as well as the White House.
While those improvements are fine as far as they go, they don't go far enough. Instead of letting investigations drag on as long as there's even the slightest suspicion of wrongdoing, a specific time limit should be set in which independent counsels must either produce concrete results or pack their bags and go home.
Moreover, must the independent counsel law be renewed for the usual five years? Surely it shouldn't take that long to determine if the new provisions are working out or must be modified.
Such restrictions would be easy for the House to write into the law. But it would be harder, though just as necessary, for Washington to curb the temptation to use the independent counsel to conduct a political fishing expedition. Too often the outside investigator, lacking a clearly defined objective, merely roils the waters and looks for anything that might turn up. That is an abuse of prosecutorial powers.
One final point: Though the independent counsel law has been on the books 15 years, the 12 outside investigators who have held that post have produced little in return for the more than $43 million they have spent.
If the newly improved law does not produce a better track record, it should not be renewed. This nation went without special prosecutors for two centuries and can get along without them again if it must.