THE GOOD OLD DAYS

Remember the good old days of the independent counsel statute? Read WaPo here (via Atrios).

The lesson: in politics, never complain about methods. Just use them to your advantage, later. That requires taking the long view, which is, of course, hard (the political discount rates being much more severe than those that operate in capital markets).

MORE: Jeff Cooper disagrees, with a link to this post by Greg Greene. I'm not saying that it would be a good idea to revive the statute. I'm saying that it would be nice to have it around now and then allow Republicans to kill it for being used in a partisan fashion. Plus if political time horizons were longer, potential abuses of such statutes would be rarer because there would be more of a fear that such methods could be used by one's political enemies in the future. But time horizons are not long, so I haven't really said anything interesting here. . .