The Week.(analysis of current events)

A check of our records reveals that Robert Hanssen, the apparent FBI straight arrow and accused spy, took out a subscription to National Review soon after his espionage allegedly began. We are sorry whenever our arguments fail to convince a reader, though we are glad that reading them is taken to be a sign of patriotism.

In an extraordinary New York Times Op-Ed piece, Bill Clinton attempted to explain why he pardoned fugitive tax-evader and traitor Marc Rich. Clinton regurgitated the arguments made to him by Jack Quinn, the former White House counsel who represents Rich: the charges were excessive, two respected tax experts said Rich did nothing wrong, etc. None of it washed. Answering the ex-president in the Washington Post, Rich prosecutor Morris Weinberg cited the dozens of witnesses who would have testified in detail about Rich's financial wrongdoing. Weinberg also pointed out that the two tax experts who exonerated Rich were hired by none other than Marc Rich himself. And then there was Clinton's biggest whopper of all. "The case for the pardons," Clinton wrote, "was reviewed and advocated . . . by three distinguished Republican attorneys." As it turned out, none of the "distinguished Republicans" reviewed or advocated the pardon case. And now the scandal has expanded to include the pardons of Glenn Braswell and Carlos Vignali, among others. Clinton's spin on those? Maybe he'll tell us in the Times.

President Carter has called Clinton's pardon of Rich a "disgrace." For this, many people have applauded and sighed. It is good that the Sunday-school-teaching Sage of Plains has found his moral voice. But he had never really been heard from on the subject of his Democratic successor. Bill Clinton was sworn in in January 1993. For the next eight years, he committed abuses unseen since Nixon, and little seen before then. Those abuses reached a crescendo when he used a 21-year- old White House intern for sex in the Oval Office; then committed perjury about it; and obstructed justice and tampered with witnesses. Many people-almost all in the Republican party-opposed this behavior and condemned it. Members of the House actually impeached Clinton, at great political risk. They were backed by just about no one among the Democrats, including the former president. And eight years after Clinton was sworn in, Jimmy Carter finds an occasion to call a Clinton action disgraceful-and it was one measly pardon. His late hit is, in a way, disgraceful itself.

A-what's the collective noun? "pride"? -of billionaires has come out in support of the estate tax, which prevents the moderately rich (though not, of course, the super-rich) from bequeathing financial security to their heirs. Some 120 of America's wealthiest have published a petition urging that the tax be preserved. Now, there is hardly any more fundamental human motivation than the desire for one's children to live better than oneself. Some unknown, but surely large, component of America's entrepreneurial vitality springs from that motivation. Successful people do not necessarily want their children to wallow in idle luxury, but they do want them to be free of money worries. The desire of the petitioners-folk like George Soros, Warren Buffett, and Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's ice cream-to maintain a confiscatory tax regime on farmers and small businessmen is arrogant and antisocial. They themselves are, of course, at liberty to give as much money to the Treasury as they wish. The rest of us should be allowed to pass the comparatively little we have been able to accumulate (and that has already, of course, been taxed at least once) on to those we love.

Since 1994, a majority of governors have been Republicans. But the National Governors' Association is still dominated by liberals, as evidenced by its recent proposal on Medicaid. The governors want to be allowed to expand coverage without being hampered by federal restrictions. Don't be fooled by the federalist rhetoric the governors are using. Under their plan, the federal government would continue to pay for most Medicaid expenses, so the result would be increased dependence on Washington. Increasingly, the NGA is acting like a cartel designed to shield the governors from the competition and accountability that true federalism entails. Where are the trustbusters when you need them?

Public-school educators apparently will do anything to fend off school choice, even if it means they have to work at raising their students' test scores. That's the lesson from Florida, which has promised vouchers to students attending schools that receive two F grades from the state during a four-year period. A Manhattan Institute report shows that schools earning a failing mark in 1999-and therefore faced with the imminent prospect of a voucherized student population-posted impressive test-score gains the next year. Fear is indeed a powerful motivator. The study undercuts the teacher-union claim that school choice hurts public schools. On the contrary, Florida shows that the mere threat of choice improves student performance. Just imagine what the real thing might do.

Madison and Hamilton, along with the rest of the Founders, assumed that the states would retain their "sovereign immunity" under the Constitution. They could not be sued in federal courts. When the Supreme Court held that a state could be sued by a citizen of another state, the Eleventh Amendment was swiftly and easily passed to reverse its decision. But the amendment, designed as it was to correct a specific erroneous decision of the Court, did not address whether a state could be sued in federal court by one of its own citizens. In several cases, the modern Supreme Court has reasoned that these suits, too, must be barred. In February, the Court held that state workers therefore cannot sue state governments under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Because the letter of the Eleventh Amendment does not cover the case, liberals have charged the Court with "conservative activism." But this is no judicial leap in the dark. The Court has not divined "emanations" from the Constitution, nor has it nullified the ADA altogether. It has made a reasonable and limited inference from the structure and history of the Constitution. If only Congress had been as careful when it wrote the law.