The Buck Stops Where?

By Charles Bierbauer/CNN

WASHINGTON (Oct. 10) -- One branch of the federal government says what it means, means what it says and rarely says anything more. Is it the president, the Congress or the Supreme Court?

Easy question. These days, with Congress and the White House tearing at each other, you can count on little more than the judicial branch of government to play it straight. The buck stops at the bench.

The Supreme Court is new to my portfolio. After the first week of arguments in the Supreme Court's new term and a summer of digging into its workings and laboring with its briefs, I find it refreshing to deal with an institution where politics is frowned upon, self-aggrandizing rhetoric scorned, substantive issues addressed and conclusive decisions taken. I can't say that about the other beats in Washington.

Not that the court's arguments lack flair.

"Suppose the candidate's name is Willy Wacko and everyone regards him as a total loser. Would you have to give him access?" Chief Justice William Rehnquist asked this week of a lawyer contesting an independent congressional candidate's exclusion from a televised political debate.

"Antitrust law is not there to protect the merchant, but to protect the consumer," Justice Antonin Scalia dismissively admonished an attorney pleading for a service station dealer's right to break a profit-limiting contract.

Not that politics doesn't get the justices appointed to the court in the first place. Presidents surely select those who match their own ideological molds. The molds, though, are sometimes broken after the justices move to their white marble bastion of independence on Capitol Hill.

In some cases, justices' votes are predictable. Often they are not. There are clear liberal and conservative wings of the nine-member court. And a volatile middle that swings the 5-4 votes. But the law, justices will tell you, is itself conservative, not eagerly tampered with, most frequently kept intact.

The Supreme Court may pass the buck back to lower courts and instruct them to straighten things out. But above all, the court leaves the impression that at the end of the day, when a decision is made, it is definitive. Those decisions have impact. They affect lives. They do not drift into the ether to be replaced by the next gust of hot air.

What can be said of the other branches of government? The president proposes; Congress disposes. It's an old Washington adage, suggesting the division of powers. Right now, it's a formula of disingenuous dysfunction and disdain. And you can heap it on just about all parties.

The president proposes almost daily. A plan to make the Internal Revenue Service more taxpayer-friendly is being touted this day. Much of it falls on deaf ears. Perhaps, since Congress has also set its sights on the seemingly hapless and eternally thankless IRS, something may come of this. Yes, there was a budget-balancing agreement hammered out earlier this year.

Yet so much of what is proposed, either at the White House or in Congress, is barely heard of again. Members of Congress are egregious in making bold public pronouncements for legislation they know may never even get a committee hearing. Amendments are strung on a House or Senate bill with the full knowledge they will not be approved in the other chamber of Congress.

When Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott tacked an amendment on to the campaign finance reform bill this week, it was not with the intent of getting it passed but with the full knowledge that he'd administered a "poison pill" to kill the legislation. It was a perfectly legitimate legislative manipulation, but it needed to be seen for what it was.

"Campaign finance reform is not going to pass this year," said Sen. Lott even as his fellow Republicans railed at Democrats in the hearings investigating the excesses and possible illegalities in fund-raising for last year's presidential campaign.

"The Buck Stops Here" is the famous motto President Truman kept on his Oval Office desk.

"The Buck Doesn't Even Pause Here" was the version on chief of staff Donald Regan's White House desk during the Reagan administration.

Now it's just "Deposit Bucks Here."

"We did what the law permitted," Clinton's savvy former deputy chief of staff, Harold Ickes, told the Senate investigation this week.

Truman's "buck" had something to do with responsibility. That's the buck that's so readily passed these days. Neither party has particularly clean hands. But it's the White House that's leaving smudged prints these days.

"Mr. President, I would suggest this is your campaign," Sen. Fred Thompson, who chairs the investigation, charged. "Much of this money that was raised was for your campaign and for your re-election. This is your White House. This is your Department of Justice, and these are your tapes. And you have a responsibility."

The tapes are the recently discovered collection of White House home videos showing Clinton hosting willing contributors at those now infamous coffees. It's no surprise they exist. Just about everyone who shakes the president's hand at such an event gets a picture to prove it. Nearly everywhere a president goes he is accompanied by not only a photographer but also a television crew -- an in-house crew, not the TV networks. The crews are military personnel assigned to the White House Communications Agency.

No wonder Attorney General Janet Reno was so upset with White House delays in turning over these tapes.

"I was mad," the attorney general told reporters in a rare display of anger with the White House.

No wonder many Americans, like the California family I met on vacation this summer, say they have absolutely no interest in Washington politics and feel they aren't getting their buck's worth of good government.