EDITORIAL : HAD ENOUGH? IT'S TIME TO EITHER SCRAP OR AMEND THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL LAW.

NOW that it's been their turn to have their ox gored (no pun about the vice president is intended), Democrats in Congress are having second thoughts about renewing the independent counsel law next year.

It's about time.

The Ethics in Government Act, which permitted appointed lawyers accountable to no one to waste untold millions on dollars on mostly fruitless fishing expeditions, was a bad idea from the beginning.

All the public prosecutors that we can think of in federal, state and local offices are either elected by the people or appointed by elected officials.

While this arrangement can create conflict-of-interest problems, it nevertheless assures that these prosecutors will be accountable to the voters either directly or indirectly. That's the way it should be in a government that's of the people, by the people and for the people.

Unfortunately, Washington lost sight of that fundamental principle of representative government in its zeal to get to the bottom of the Watergate scandal. So when President Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Saturday Night Massacre in 1973, Congress responded by passing a law that essentially made independent counsels responsible to no one holding elected office.

This led to some runaway and highly politicized investigations, most notably the six-year Iran-Contra probe.

Republicans tried to change the law when it came up for renewal in 1993 by allowing Congress to cut off funding for any independent counsel after two years. But they were outvoted by Democrats anxious to appear squeaky clean - and milk as much political mileage as possible out of Iran-Contra and other GOP embarrassments.

President Clinton and his fellow Democrats have long since tasted their own medicine as a result of the investigations by Kenneth Starr and others. But while some might write all this off as typical political payback, we believe it simply shows that the independent counsel law as written is fatally flawed.

Many of these flaws were pointed out by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his prophetic 1988 dissent in a decision upholding an independent counsel law.

Scalia argued that the law violated the principle of separation of powers and encourages presidential enemies to badger the White House.

``How much easier it is,'' Scalia wrote, ``for Congress, instead of accepting the political damage attendant to the commencement of impeachment proceedings against the president on trivial grounds - or, for that matter, how easy it is for one of the president's political foes outside of Congress, to simply trigger a debilitating criminal investigation of the chief executive under this law.''

One way to discourage such abuses in the future is to make independent counsels accountable, just like other public servants.

Permit the president to fire them - and take the heat (like Nixon) for doing it. Allow Congress to decide whether to continue to fund investigations - and take the heat for it. That's the American way.

The American way can be messy. But it's still far superior to the undemocratic doctrine underlying the blatantly elitist independent counsel law.