Some Thoughts on Reform

Often it takes a crisis to nudge the nation toward a difficult decision or a necessary reform, and Watergate is predictably loosing a flood of proposals for improving the system. Congressmen, academicians and letters-to-the-editor writers are pouring out reams of schemes both for coping with the present exigency and ensuring against future excesses. A survey of some of the more intriguing suggestions, by topic:

OUSTING THE PRESIDENT. Those who suspect that ultimately Nixon must go but want to spare both President and nation the ordeal of impeachment have been searching the Constitution for a more graceful means of exit. Former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford has proposed that Vice President Agnew resign and that Congress submit to the President a list of three possible successors. Under the 25th Amendment Nixon could then choose one to be the new Vice President, who would take office upon confirmation by a simple majority vote of both houses. Nixon then could resign in his favor. To ensure harmony, the new President would agree not to run again in 1976, though Clifford does not spell out how such a bargain could be enforced, should the incumbent decide he likes the job.

Clifford justifies his elaborate plan on the grounds that "the promotion of Mr. Agnew to the presidency would result only in a truncated operation composed of the remnants of the Nixon Administration." Under his proposal, "there would be no implied admission of personal guilt on the part of Mr. Nixon, but simply a recognition that misconduct by high officials of the Nixon Administration has fatally compromised its ability to function in the national interest."

THE FBI. To prevent any future politicization of the nation's chief investigative agency, Senator Robert C. Byrd has submitted a bill that would limit the FBI director's term to seven years, make the bureau an independent agency and take it out from under the authority of the Attorney General.

Whitney North Seymour Jr., who resigned this month as a U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, wants the FBI broken up along functional lines into two separate agencies: a criminal-investigation bureau and a spy-chasing national security unit. Seymour believes that a conflict of interest between those two duties made the FBI ripe for political exploitation by the White House.

To keep the Government from delving too far into the private lives of citizens, Harvard Law Professor Arthur R. Miller advocates a separate agency to police the FBI, the CIA and other federal departments that compile data on individuals. The "Big Brother to watch Big Brother," as Miller calls it, would be controlled by Congress, as the General Accounting Office is, and would have a few citizens as members.

CAMPAIGN FINANCING. Reform of the way elections are financed could be the most immediate legacy of Watergate. Last month the Senate Commerce Committee cleared a bill that would set up an independent commission for policing national elections, limit campaign spending to 100 per voter, repeal the equal-time provision of the Federal Communications Act to encourage broadcasters to provide more free air time for presidential candidates, and forbid the channeling of campaign contributions from a single donor through a maze of dummy committees.

In addition, a number of legislators have proposed at least some federal financing for presidential elections. Senator Charles Mathias last week proposed a $21 million spending limit for each presidential candidate in the general election with one-third of the money coming from the Government. The income tax checkoff permitting a taxpayer to contribute one dollar to the party of his choice by so indicating on his tax return was used this year for the first time and is expected to yield a total of only $2,000,000 for the two major parties. But undoubtedly more money could be raised in this way if the checkoff were better publicized and voters got used to it. There is scant evidence that private political money is essential to the functioning of the Republic. Says General James Gavin, now chairman of the Arthur D. Little, Inc., consulting firm: "I am damn near feeling that there should be no campaign contributions at all, not even a single dollar. It was campaign money that was the source of Watergate."

EXECUTIVE CURBS. Watergate is seen by some scholars as a case of White House power run wild. The antidote would be to place intelligent restrictions on the exercise of presidential power, and to restore Congress to its rightful position of equality with the Executive Branch. Thus Thomas Cronin, a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, Calif., proposes creating committees in both the House and the Senate to watch over the White House staff. There are, of course, severe restrictions to the amount of power Congress can be expected to recoup. But in the areas of war-making powers, federal police powers and impounding funds, presidential authority could certainly be restored to its earlier limits.

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