Around the Nation

Around the Nation

Starr blasts Independent Counsel law

Independent counsel Kenneth Starr, testifying before a Senate committee considering whether to revise the law or scrap it altogether, blasted the statute for leading to investigations that are too open-ended, too costly to run and subject to harsh political attack.

"No matter what the Congress decides, no matter what microsurgical precision is applied to fine-tune the statute, these problems will endure," Starr testified.

Yet Starr made clear he still intends to continue his broad-ranging, five-year Whitewater investigation, pursue possible criminal prosecution of President Clinton after he leaves the White House and take whatever political heat it generates.

Critical Democrats blamed Starr, more than the law, for what they said was his mistreatment of convicted Whitewater conspirator Susan McDougal as well as former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, whose affair with Clinton led to the president's impeachment.

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) asked Starr why he should not leave office immediately under "this constitutional monstrosity of a statute" - and even Republicans expressed dismay.

"If the law is as bad as you say it is, maybe we should just abrogate it now," remarked Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa).

The exchanges in some ways captured a legislative debate that has found no shortage of flaws in the current system but few alternatives that would eliminate them or avoid creating additional ones.

With a welter of proposals on the table, Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., chair of the Governmental Affairs Committee, reflected on the remoteness of any solution in saying, "There is no need for the committee to rush to judgment."

Starr replied that although he believes the law that expires June 30 is "structurally unsound," his office is "going to enforce the law."

"That's our duty. That's our obligation," he said.

Starr's testimony that the act should be scrapped ran into conflicting sentiment from some of his staunchest GOP supporters, who noted that abandonment of the law would leave sensitive political investigations in the hands of Attorney General Janet Reno.

Thompson and other Senate Republicans view Reno with distrust, largely for her refusal to recommend an independent counsel to probe Democratic fund-raising abuses arising from the 1996 election.

Reno, too, has urged Congress to scrap the law as unworkable and unwieldy, putting her on the same side of the issue as Starr, whose conduct has been the subject of an internal Justice Department investigation .

Stung at being placed on the defensive by charges he mishandled McDougal and Lewinsky, Starr at one point shouted "absolute falsehood!" to the allegations. He insisted he has followed routine Justice Department policies and practices.

Flushed with anger, he said Chief U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson had upheld his initial immunity discussions with Lewinsky, despite critics' claims the talks had been initiated without Lewinsky's lawyer being present.

"How often has a judge told us we were out of control?" Starr asked. "Not once!"

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) who favors re-authorizing the independent counsel law this summer, wrested from Starr a grudging admission that an investigation that clears a high government official of wrongdoing would win more acceptance from the public if it were conducted by an independent prosecutor rather than the Justice Department.

"I do agree with that," Starr said. But he added that outside prosecutors appointed by attorneys general often have won public acceptance of their investigations, too.

Post ofces to extend hours for tax season

Hundreds of larger post offices around the country will be open late to accommodate the crunch, many of the biggest until midnight local time. And taxpayers who file electronically have until the last minute to zap their returns to the Internal Revenue Service.

A reminder: If you can't finish in time, file for an extension using Form 4868 and pay the IRS as much of your estimated bill as possible to avoid interest and penalties. You can also pay by MasterCard, American Express or Discover card by calling 1-888-2PAYTAX - for a 2.5 percent fee.

The IRS expects to receive 126 million individual income tax returns this year, with total income taxes projected at $828.6 billion. That's just under half the $1.7 trillion in overall federal tax collections used to pay for everything from cruise missiles to highway bridges to food stamps.

Working people pay more in U.S. taxes than over 40,000 foreign-controlled corporations operating in this country. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reported yesterday that tax loopholes allowed a majority of those companies to escape any taxes in 1995 - an amount estimated at $35 billion a year.

"It's part of citizenship here, but these corporations are getting by in many cases with a free ride," said Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) who released the study.

Still, mainly because of new child and education credits, Americans are enjoying much larger refunds at $1,563 on average, or 15 percent above last year. And they've used computers to electronically file 21.1 million returns, almost 24 percent more than last year.

But the jury is still out on whether the much-publicized IRS reform law is making the agency treat taxpayers better. Senate Finance Committee Chairperson William Roth, whose hearings last year helped spark the reforms, said he believes only about 20 percent of all IRS employees support the changes.

"Typically, a bureaucracy will say, 'We'll just wait it out,'" said Roth (R-Del.) "We're talking about changing attitudes."

House OKs review of census results

The bill is the Republican answer to Democratic efforts to use a method known as statistical sampling to correct chronic errors in the traditional door-to-door head count.

The House vote did not appear likely to settle an issue that has festered since a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year forced the Clinton administration to revise its census plan. That issue is: What steps will the federal government take to improve a counting process that historically has missed an outsized number of residents in poor, immigrant and ethnic minority communities?

Prospects for the "post-census local review" bill in the Senate are unclear. Even if the bill succeeds there, Clinton administration officials would recommend a presidential veto. The margin of approval in the House, 223 to 206, fell far short of the two-thirds required to override a veto.

The vote, largely along party lines, showed the depth of the split on how to tally America's population as Congress considers funding for the Commerce Department, the agency that oversees the Census Bureau.

Republicans argued that the census should stick to the constitutional mandate of an "actual enumeration" and that local governments were best equipped to spot and fix counting errors.

Democrats contended that Republicans were trying to revive a program that had flopped in 1990 in an effort to prevent a more effective means of quality control - a scientific population sample.

While both parties depicted themselves as guardians of objectivity, accusations of political gamesmanship flared frequently.

"Why does the majority want to repeat 1990 with all those undisputed errors?" said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) the bill's leading opponent. "Because they believe that errors in the censure to their political advantage."

In response to what he called a "malicious diatribe," House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) said, "Suffice it to say that it is commonplace among the Democrats for them to accuse us of what they themselves are doing."

04-15-99