WASHINGTON, DC - It is perhaps a hopeful sign that liberalism has been reduced to celebrating anniversaries. Two weeks ago it was the Marshall Plan. This week it is the 25th anniversary of the Watergate burglary, the beginning of that oh-so-splendid crusade to save the Constitution and the republic from the nefarious Nixon. Bliss was it to be a liberal lawyer on a Congressional committee in the two years that followed. It is doubtful that any of the self-congratulatory reminiscences this week will devote even a nanosecond to considering how the doctrine of unintended consequences played out in the Watergate saga.

The party line will consist of the one-way refrain that Nixon was out to subvert the Constitution. No one is likely to acknowledge that Watergate-inspired legislation such as the War Powers Act and especially the Budget Act of 1974 has done as much to erode principled constitutional government as anything Nixon did. No one seems to have noticed that what began as a crusade to keep the president from abusing executive power ended with the substantial aggrandizement of the power of Congress over the executive branch. In other words, a temporary constitutional crisis (temporary because the president's tenure is transient) became the occasion of the creation of a permanent constitutional usurpation by Congress.

The real unacknowledged story of Watergate is the fact that, with the Vietnam War finally over, Nixon began in 1973 a deliberate program to tame the bureaucracy and curb federal spending. When Nixon exercised the well-established presidential power of impoundment, the fury of liberals, with their spending programs and hence their political base in jeopardy, knew no bounds. Nixon had to be destroyed, and Watergate provided the non-partisan excuse for what was essentially a partisan crusade. This has become the model for pressing a partisan attack in supposedly non-partisan guise: witness the ethics investigation of Speaker Gingrich. The Watergate metaphor has evolved into water torture for any effective partisan, especially any Republican partisan.

Meanwhile, don't be surprised if you don't hear much from the Clintons about this auspicious anniversary. Hillary Rodham, as we all know, was a young lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee that brought the articles of impeachment against Nixon. She certainly doesn't want to remind people that the third article of impeachment against Nixon was "failure to comply with congressional subpoenas." That would sound too familiar for comfort.

As for Bill, well, this former professor of constitutional law at the University of Arkansas may be familiar with Alexander Hamilton's characterization of the impeachment power in The Federalist. Hamilton explained that the impeachment power was not like an ordinary criminal inquiry, but rather was "designed as a method of national inquest into the conduct of public men." (Hamilton's emphasis.) In other words, the impeachment power is as much political as legal. Which prompts the following speculation: If Clinton faced the same kind of lousy economy that Nixon had in 1973-74, he would probably be gone in a week. Let the water torture continue.

-By Steven Hayward