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A prominent academic supporter of Janice Rogers Brown's nomination to a federal appeals court bailed out Thursday, saying views of hers disclosed during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings a day earlier were "just too scary."

Stephen Barnett was one of 16 California law school professors who backed the state Supreme Court justice last week. Their joint endorsement letter extolled her intelligence and integrity to the senators, who now appear to be bitterly divided over Brown's nomination to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

On Thursday, Barnett sent a follow-up letter, saying he no longer supports Brown. He said he had just read speeches with which committee members confronted her during the hearing, including one in which she blamed government for placing families "under siege" and causing "war in the streets."

We all would have been better off had President Nixon dismissed Haldeman and Ehrlichman at the outset of Watergate, before the massive cover-up ensued. Certainly the nation would have benefited from a single continuous independent review of that scandal, rather than enduring the Saturday Night Massacre. If the administration fails to quickly take action to remove Rove and appoint a special counsel, it will be sending us down the same unfortunate path of that third-rate burglary more than 30 years ago.

Bush's press secretary Scott McClellan has chosen his words carefully in denying that anyone at the White House was involved with the leak. To remain credible, a press secretary cannot be caught in either a lie, or a serious misstatement based on ignorance.

McClellan's response reminded me of the Nixon Administration. Nixon's press secretary, Ron Zeigler, took the line that no one presently employed in his administration was involved in the Watergate break-in. That was technically correct, but only technically.

It is entirely possible that no one at the Bush "White House" or on the President's personal staff, was involved in the initial leak to Novak. It could have been someone at the National Security Council, which is related to the Bush White House but not part of it.

In fact, Novak wrote in one of his later columns, that the leak came from a person who was "no partisan gunslinger." That sounds like an NSC staffer to me. And as Newsweek also reported (you can count on Michael Isikoff to dig this stuff out), Valerie Plame's CIA identity was likely known to senior intelligence people on the NSC staff, for apparently one of them had worked with Ms. Plame at the CIA.

But even if the White House was not initially involved with the leak, it has exploited it. As a result, it may have opened itself to additional criminal charges under the federal conspiracy statute.

How can the White House not have already thought that an unsuccessful investigation led by John Ashcroft is much worse for George W. Bush than an unsuccessful investigation led by an independent counsel? How can the White House not have already thought that an unsuccessful investigation--one that leaves people whom George H.W. Bush calls "insidious traitors" working inside the White House--is much worse for the country (and for George W. Bush) than a rapidly-concluded successful investigation?

Several federal prosecutors said they were deeply concerned about the new policy, which was first reported in The Wall Street Journal.

A West Coast prosecutor who spoke on condition of anonymity said that while it might be difficult for officials in Washington to enforce the new policy, it nonetheless puts significant pressure on prosecutors to explain their actions and will most likely result in fewer plea bargains in many jurisdictions.

"There's no doubt this could have a real impact on all of us," the prosecutor said.

The Federal Criminal Code has so many overlapping laws, that if they enforce such a policy, literally, misdemeanors are going to become felonies, and felonies are going to be stacked one on top of another. That is not effective law enforcement, rather it is draconian law enforcement. Ultimately, such a policy will not only clog the courts, it will mean the Federal Government will have to build a lot more prisons.

A prominent jurist put it this way 14 years ago:

For nearly a century and a half, courts in the United States excercising the power of judicial review [for constitutionality] had no precedents to look to save their own, because our courts alone excercised this sort of authority. When many new constitutional courts were created after the Second World War, these courts naturally looked to decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, among other sources, for developing their own law. But now that constitutional law is solidly grounded in so many countries, it is time that the United States courts begin looking to the decisions of other constitutional courts to aid in their own deliberative process.

That was Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.