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Ken Starr testifies before the House Committee on Education and Workforce as president of Baylor University, May 8, 2014.
Photo:
Lauren Victoria Burke/Associated Press
From “My Job,” an op-ed by former independent counsel
Kenneth W. Starr
in the Journal, July 8, 2004. Starr died Tuesday at 76:
Six years later, the factual findings of our office’s referral to the House of Representatives stand unrebutted. Those findings not only were accurate, they triggered profound concerns as to the basic integrity of witnesses, including the president himself, in the administration of justice. The result included an outgoing president’s written recognition of his responsibility to our justice system, imposition of sanctions by a federal judge, and a suspension of his law license for an extended period.
The lessons learned from this unhappy history go far beyond the bedrock need for basic honesty on the part of our public officials. A less obvious lesson is the vital importance of integrity in our structural arrangements at the Founding. As in buildings, architecture counts when it comes to government. The entire independent counsel experiment, launched in the wake of Watergate, was a noble idea, but it tugged at our architecture in the form of basic principles of separation of powers. Prosecutors should be accountable within the executive branch, not left to languish outside the tripartite system of government.
This lesson was not unknown. The Justice Department under Ronald Reagan took a long and careful look at the special prosecutor law (as it was then called) in the early 1980s and determined that the law both was unconstitutional (violating separation of powers) and reflected bad policy (the diminution of responsibility and accountability).
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Appeared in the September 14, 2022, print edition.
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