Wednesday, October 15, 1997

The growing cost of those counsels

Today Attorney General Janet Reno goes before the House Judiciary Committee, where she will no doubt be blasted because she has failed to appoint yet another independent counsel.

It's a tedious drama already played out ad nauseum, so we wish someone would focus more light on just one underlying problem resulting from the nearly two-decade law governing counsel appointments: their cost.

Both parties are equally guilty of using this process as a political football, then letting special prosecutors run rampant, racking up huge bills that seldom are justified by the resulting convictions.

The politicians either love or loathe the counsel law, depending upon whether it's being used against their enemies or friends. Most Americans, however, might be more interested in the price of all this partisanship masquerading as ethical concern.

By most counts, 18 prosecutors have been appointed since the Ethics in Government Act went into effect 19 years ago. The General Accounting Office estimates they've spent about $135 million.

In one troubling sidelight, none of the agencies involved with the act -- the Circuit Court of Appeals, the Justice Department, the House Judiciary Committee, the General Accounting Office -- keeps track of the number of convictions racked up by the counsels. So true performance measures are hard to come by.

But one recent count put the number of convictions and guilty pleas at 48, mostly for relatively minor offenses far removed from the alleged crimes that launched the investigations in the first place.

That comes to $2.8 million per person successfully prosecuted -- a bit pricey for justice, in our view. And that doesn't include the huge amount of money the Justice Department spends reviewing the multiple political calls for independent counsels.

If Reno appoints another counsel it will, incredibly, be her fifth since taking office. Meanwhile, at least three independent counsel investigations are still running. And so is the meter.