As the US Independent Counsel, Judge Kenneth Starr, addressed an audience at Trinity College Dublin last night, a "decent burial" was proposed for the Independent Counsel law, which will lapse on June 30th unless it is renewed.
Senator Fred Thompson, chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, has proposed that, instead of the present law, Congress should require the Justice Department to draw up rules for the appointment of outside prosecutors.
Under these rules, the Attorney General could appoint outside counsel to investigate allegations of misconduct by a president and a number of senior figures.
Senator Thompson said the present law was a noble but flawed attempt to promote integrity in government. Because of its complexity it had become a "crutch" for everyone and had permitted the Attorney General to avoid appointing independent counsels in some cases, the senator said.
In Dublin Judge Starr was delivering the fifth annual Nissan Lecture, organised by the TCD School of Law.
He referred to American obsessions with scandals, from Nixon back to the days of Ulysses Grant.
Judge Starr also explained the legal standing of the role of Independent Counsel enacted 21 years ago and due to expire at the end of the month.
He said that structural inefficiencies in government were "quintessentially American".
He said "smooth functioning" was not particularly paramount to American politics, but other values were, the most important being "individual liberty and limited government". Judge Starr reflected on some inadequacies of the Independent Counsel statute. "In the view of many people back in the 1970s and 1980s, myself included, this new Independent Counsel law was unconstitutional. Under that view, Congress had violated the principle of separated powers.
"While the Supreme Court subsequently upheld the statute, it did so in a way that caused the statute's structural flaws to become increasingly manifest in practice, as I have found during my years.
"What is the alternative? When I testified before the Senate a few months ago I urged that the statute be permitted to expire. Let the Attorneys General appoint special prosecutors when necessary. Let's go back to past practice, with all its faults and shortcomings."