Imperial Presidency

WASHINGTON -- While organizers of President Clinton's second inaugural have touted next month's celebration as smaller and less expensive than the 1993 extravaganza, the cost borne by taxpayers will be the highest ever, according to White House records.This taxpayer expense was not highlighted at a recent briefing by inaugural organizers, who focused instead on the strict standards imposed this time for collecting private donations for "cheaper" parties and other special events.But according to budgets provided by the White House and Congress -- and not including the undisclosed inaugural budget of the Secret Service -- the public cost is at least $12.7 million.

"As the president said, if your actions result in only saving one life, they're worth taking," Vice President Joe Biden declared last week as he previewed what his commission on gun violence might actually do. "There are executive orders, there's executive action that can be taken. We haven't decided what that is yet. But we're compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the Cabinet members as well as legislative action that we believe is required. " Mr. Biden insisted that it is a moral imperative for the White House to do something: "It's critically important that we act. " Most of the attention, understandably, is on Mr. Biden's suggestion that the president will consider using executive orders to do things he couldn't possibly accomplish legislatively.

MEXICO CITY -- Some 50 congressional candidates from the party that has ruled Mexico for two-thirds of a century gathered not long ago to hear a consultant discuss an opinion poll for the July 6 elections.Good news, he said.Their party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party -- the PRI -- had "a solid floor of votes," he said. More good news: Support for one of the two major opposition parties was soft and could switch to the PRI.The real news was that the PRI felt its candidates actually needed to prepare for a campaign.

Modern presidents control war powers So Gregory Kane has just discovered Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which says only Congress can declare war ("Protesters pick wrong target for their anger," Oct. 3). He may also be interested in knowing that, since the last time war was declared by Congress in 1941, presidents have always found ways of circumventing Congress and setting their own war agendas. After President Lyndon Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin incident (which many historians now say never occurred)

WASHINGTON -- When it comes to the perquisites of power, people who live in White Houses shouldn't throw stones.So say the Democratic leaders of Congress. They've been watching in agonized disbelief as President Bush gleefully tries to exploit the lawmakers' troubles over the House bank scandal. They're irked that he, of all people, is advancing the image of public servants too bloated on perks and privileges to serve the public."He lives a life like no other human being in the world," observed Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.

So now it's all out. All there. It's all about the 42nd president of the United States; it only reads like a 15-year-old's clumsy erotic adventures in his mother's house. It took place in the White House, but not the White House as you see it if you take the tour. This is White House as highway rest stop.The information began crossing the national wire in a series of dispatches early Friday evening: "StarrReport-LongExcerpt," "StarrReport-MediumExcerpt," "StarrReport-ShortExcerpt." By this morning, Friday afternoon will seem like some golden age of American innocence.

An article in Monday's Sun on state Comptroller Louis L Goldstein should have said that Eugene Talmadge was governor of Georgia in 1940.The Sun regrets the error.NEW YORK -- Maryland's 100-member delegation plunged into the whirl of the Democratic Party convention yesterday hoping for a new beginning at the national level but trusting in its own elder statesman."We have what the country needs," said 79-year-old state Comptroller Louis L. Goldstein. "We have a good team and youthful leadership."

After years in which the Bush administration has steadily expanded the boundaries of executive power with little or no resistance, some members of the Republican-led Congress - emboldened by the president's low poll numbers or worried about the relevancy of their own institution - have begun to push back. In the House, leaders of both parties loudly protested the recent FBI search of a congressman's office and have demanded that seized documents be returned. In a rare Senate flare-up, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter chided Vice President Dick Cheney last week for interfering in the committee's probe of secret surveillance programs.

When the textbooks of tomorrow are written, the part about Bill Clinton will almost certainly open with that phrase. His legacy will revolve around the tawdry affair with a young White House intern that led him to become only the second president ever tried for impeachable offenses.But what has been the impact of the Clinton scandal on the rest of us? Have the workings of government been affected? What about the press? The law? The American workplace?As events that became a part of our national consciousness start to recede into memory, members of The Sun's Washington bureau take a look at what's left behind and what has changed, now that the impeachment trial is over.