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 W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 11 — President Clinton is determined to flex his executive muscle at every turn these days, but much of the time he seems to be wearing a straitjacket. In this final year of Clinton’s presidency, the White House staff is seizing every opportunity to show that he can get things done, despite a recalcitrant Congress. Many of his policy actions, however, highlight just how limited a president’s executive power can be. A few examples:  At an event last week, Clinton said his administration was
“beginning the most aggressive effort ever undertaken to ensure
responsible behavior by gun dealers.” Aides who detailed the plan said
focused, intensive inspections of gun dealers by the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms would be one of the key elements of this crackdown.
But Congress has put limits on ATF’s ability to inspect gun dealers unless
there’s reason to believe that a specific dealer is breaking the law.
Under current law, ATF can conduct routine inspections only once a year,
meaning that some problem dealers might not get a full inspection until
2001. The White House billed a Clinton executive order issued Tuesday
as a “historic action” to protect against employment-related abuses of
genetic testing. The order applies only to civilians employees of the
federal government, though officials could not identify any federal agency
that had adopted or was about to adopt a program that would require or
even request that workers disclose results of tests that might show a
predisposition for disease. Clinton himself acknowledged that his order
doesn’t go very far. “By executive order, I can only do so much,” he said
before signing the paperwork. He went on to endorse a bill pending in
Congress that would prohibit the use of genetic test results in
private-sector employment decisions. In December, Clinton unveiled with great fanfare new regulations
to limit some pollutants in emissions from gas-guzzling SUVs. But what
about the gas guzzling itself? Nothing he can do on that front. Congress
has passed and the president has signed a series of measures that
eliminate his authority to increase fuel economy standards.
To be sure, some Clinton actions have been dramatic. His designation of more than a million acres of land in Arizona and California as new national monuments certainly drew attention. The White House said the new monument status would protect the land from development and mining. Predictably, Republicans howled in anger. But Clinton aides never could say just who was racing to develop the land. They also acknowledged that the likelihood of new mining claims was pretty remote. Why does Clinton’s staff try so hard to make these half-measures sound so significant? They’re under orders. Aides say that Chief of Staff John Podesta has sent down word that, whenever possible, the president’s events are to include regulatory or executive actions designed to dispel the notion that he’s a lame duck. In an e-mail response to questions from ABCNEWS.com, Podesta acknowledged that he has told the staff to search high and low for unilateral actions that the president can take. “We need to operate in a context which recognizes our authority, sometimes broad … sometimes more limited,” Podesta wrote. He also defended the president’s move to bar genetic discrimination by federal agencies. “I think it’s an important step in that the U.S. government is the nation’s largest employer, the executive order educates the public and sets a standard for the private sector, and it puts pressure on Congress to address the issue.” Podesta noted that there are some areas, like medical privacy, where Congress has failed to act and Clinton will come in to pick up the ball. “Where he has broader authority, like to protect electronic medical records, the president will use it, appropriately, of course.” Gun Posse Briefs .gif){kind=small} The White House rolled out the big guns for a press briefing last week on the aforementioned gun dealer initiative. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers was at the podium, along with Undersecretary for Enforcement James Johnson, ATF Director Brad Buckles and Clinton Domestic Policy Adviser Bruce Reed. They were supported by a host of other staffers. A total of 11 policy types were on hand. (Treasury also sent an official photographer and a security man.) Judging by size alone, the briefing team should have easily defeated the press corps, which fielded only nine reporters by my count. Despite the bench strength, the briefers couldn’t answer a basic question about their most-touted statistic. The president and Summers both noted a new finding that roughly 1 percent of licensed gun dealers account for 57 percent of the guns traced to crimes. But what percentage of gun sales do those dealers account for? The question comes straight out of Statistics 101 — something Summers, who spent about 10 years teaching economics at MIT and Harvard, clearly recognized. (In fact, the 57 percent number means almost nothing unless one knows the total sales volume for those dealers.) Nonetheless, the 11-member team was stumped. Summers and a Treasury staffer said they’d track down the number. “I think it’s considerably less,” the secretary ventured. What’s the answer? Nobody knows. According to an ATF spokesman, dealers aren’t required to report their sales figures to the government. “We don’t even keep those kinds of statistics,” he said. Presidential Preoccupation? Privacy is shaping up to be a big issue for Democrats in this election year. Polls show Americans are concerned a loss of privacy may be one of the costs of the technology revolution. The White House is working on ways to address concerns about control over personal information kept in online data banks and medical records. At an event this week to unveil his genetic privacy initiative, President Clinton shared some of his own privacy worries: “Powerful ways of technological change threaten to erode our sacred walls of privacy in ways we could not have envisioned a generation ago …. Will you ever have a private telephone conversation on a cell phone again? Can you even go in your own home and know that the conversation is private if you become important enough for people to put devices in your walls?” It’s not the first time we’ve heard of the president’s concerns about privacy. Monica Lewinsky told FBI agents that Clinton once said he thought that his White House phones were being tapped by a foreign power. The FBI summarized her version of events this way: “The president said that he believed that an unnamed foreign embassy was listening in on the president’s official telephones so they would have to be careful in their phone conversations.” White House aides have never explained the president’s alleged suspicions or what country he thought might have penetrated the Oval Office phone system. Odds & Ends A magazine dedicated to accuracy in journalism admits its cover photo this month is not 100 percent authentic. The current issue of Brill’s Content has a small presidential seal adorning the cover, so small you can hardly notice it. But inside the magazine you’ll find the following disclosure: “Cover photograph altered to include presidential seal.” The seal appears only on a piece of paper being held by Content cover boy Martin Sheen, who plays President Josiah Bartlet in the NBC series West Wing. Given the fact that the seal is almost illegible at the size it was printed, one wonders why Content bothered. “We were just trying to make the photo look a little more presidential,” said Cindy Rosenthal, a spokeswoman for the magazine. Since Content founder Steve Brill often boasts of publishing corrections as prominently as the error, I asked why the disclosure wasn’t just as prominent as the alteration. “The first place we could put that would be that page,” Rosenthal said, referring to the table of contents on page 13. A federal law limits reproduction of the seal, but a White House spokesman says Content’s use would probably fall under an exception for “bona fide news content.” (In our spirit of full disclosure, it should be noted that, as usual, the issue of Content contains a number of references to ABCNEWS, some laudatory and some not.)… Few media outlets covered a Senate Appropriations subcommittee’s hearing last week on the arrangement between drug czar Barry McCaffrey and the TV networks. I was surprised to find that Salon.com, the Web site that brought the controversial deal to public attention, didn’t post a thing about this hearing. Why? Dan Forbes, author of the story, was a witness at the hearing. The Salon editor who handled Forbes’ piece says he didn’t object to his appearance and notes that Forbes is a freelancer. Many reporters have gone to court to avoid testifying at a government proceeding, but Forbes says he decided it wasn’t a problem. “The thought crossed my mind,” he said in an interview Tuesday. Forbes said he concluded “it was really important to get the story out” and notes that he took pains to keep his anonymous sources anonymous. “I was determined to respect that,” he said … The New York Times and the drug czar’s office have changed their descriptions of their relationship. The Times’ Web site used to describe the paper as being in “partnership” with the drug czar. Now, it acknowledges a “sponsorship” from McCaffrey’s office, but also carries the following disclaimer: “This site contains news articles previously published in the New York Times but no other content on the site involved the reporting or editing staff of the New York Times.” A site set up by the drug czar’s office now has a similar disclosure. A column in this space a few weeks ago included comments from media experts critical of the newspaper’s connection with the drug czar. (ABCNEWS.com jointly produces a daily newscast with the New York Times on the Web).
Josh Gerstein is a White House producer for ABCNEWS. |
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W E B L I N K S White House Briefing on Gun Dealer Crackdown ATF Report on Gun Commerce (PDF) Lewinsky Remarks on Clinton Phone-tap Fears Brill's Content on West Wing Federal Law Protecting the Presidential Seal Salon Reporter's Testimony on Anti-Drug Deal
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