The conviction of Senator Stevens

There is little doubt that Senator Stevens (R - Alaska) is a nasty piece of work who deserves everything that he is going to get. His conviction, on seven counts of felony corruption, is an outrage but not the only one.

That the voters of Alaska should have elected and re-elected such an obviously corrupt person is the first outrage. As citizens and voters we have a duty to our country to reject those whose sole objective is to raid the Federal treasury for our parochial benefit. We have all too few Senators and Representatives who are willing to act in the interests of our country as a whole.

Senator Stevens's relatively minor crime of lying on his financial disclosure forms is, I suspect, only the tip of the iceberg.

That, however, is not the point.

Think about the prosecution of Al Capone who, in 1931, in spite of his long history of racketeering and violence, was tried and convicted of the relatively minor offense of tax evasion because prosecutors were unable (or unwilling) to address the real crimes. Mr. Capone was also a person who deserved everything that he got but, as in the case of Senator Stevens, the outrage is that the power of the state is used to "get" an undesirable rather than to seek real justice.

A third issue in the trial of Senator Stevens is prosecutorial misconduct. Withholding potentially exculpatory evidence and encouraging false testimony, as happened in this trial, is another outrage.

The founders of our nation had little trust in the government's ability to wield power. We, in our turn, must constantly demand that the government's use of power conform to both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson warned us about granting too much power to government:

"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have."

Theodore Roosevelt, were he still alive, would have understood Senator Stevens:

"When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty'."