---snip---Never forget!
The folks who should have denounced such actions--particularly the allegedly “watch-dog” journalists--followed their script and granted the Clintons latitude to follow their own ends. Following her election as a Senator from New York in November, 2000--and before taking her oath of office--Hillary negotiated a book contract with Simon and Schuster, taking an advance of $8 million, “by far the largest such advance offered to any government official” (p. 40). Since she was not yet, technically, in office, she avoided the Senate’s “conflict of interest” provisos that forbade such deals. Yet her media friends, her fellow Democrats who had howled with outrage at a book deal negotiated by Newt Gingrich a few years earlier, blessed her windfall.
Nor did many object to President Bill Clinton’s use of his “executive power” to issue wide-ranging “executive orders” in his final days.
The nation’s first five presidents, collectively, issued only 15 executive orders. Following a very different political philosophy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an astronomical 3,522 edicts in 12 years. Subsequent presidents followed suit, though with less abandon. And Clinton found he could circumvent Congress and implement his agenda through executive orders. Two days after he became president, for example, Clinton appeased his feminist fans by authorizing abortions on U.S. military bases. “’Stoke of the pen, law of the land. Kind of cool,’” said Clinton strategist Paul Begala” (p. 79).
Clinton’s final weeks in office witnessed “a gusher of executive orders and presidential decrees” (p. 79). Carrying through on his commitments to environmentalists, educators, affirmative action activists, anti-tobacco crusaders, and trial lawyers, the president pursued his agenda. He set aside lands in the West as national monuments, creating nine of them on January 17, 2001. He tried to subject America to the International Criminal Court. He established by fiat an abortion rights position, defining “a child as a ‘fetus, after delivery, that has been determined to be viable.’ Thus, instead of regarding an unborn child as a human being, the Clinton rule adopted the feminist language that characterizes a child as a fetus” (p. 91).
On his last full day in office, he also extricated himself from his own legal dilemma: perjury. “On January 19, 2001 President Clinton finally conceded that he had broken the law” (p. 97), lying to a judge. Intricate legal maneuvers, involving the president and his team of lawyers, spared him from disbarment in Arkansas. He signed a carefully-crafted statement, accepting a five-year suspension and $25,000 fine. Though subtly stated, the document is simply a plea bargain. He broke the law, but he sustained only a slight spanking.