The problem isn’t new.

A police officer is accused of wrongfully shooting an innocent man. A president is accused of protecting lawless conduct by subordinates.

It’s a foundational principle of American government that no one is above the law, and no one is beneath it. The rule of law means we have a government of laws, not of men.

What do we do when we don’t?

In the case of police misconduct, the U.S. Justice Department can step in.

But what do we do when the integrity of the Justice Department is in question?

The country has wrestled with this issue since the Teapot Dome scandal. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge appointed two special prosecutors, one Democrat and one Republican, to investigate high-ranking officials appointed by the late President Warren Harding. The attorney general was charged but eventually acquitted, and the interior secretary went to prison.

In 1973, Attorney General Elliot Richardson appointed a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, to investigate the growing Watergate scandal. President Richard Nixon later ordered Richardson to fire him, but Richardson resigned instead, and so did Deputy AG William Ruckelshaus. Nixon appointed another official, Robert Bork, as acting attorney general. Bork executed Nixon’s order.

This infamous Saturday Night Massacre triggered congressional hearings and a push for legislation to guarantee the independence of special prosecutors.

In 1978, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act, providing for the automatic appointment of a special prosecutor, later called an independent counsel, when a high-level official was suspected of serious misconduct.

There were frequent battles over reauthorizing the five-year law. But one president reauthorized it enthusiastically, calling the law “a foundation stone for the trust between the government and our citizens” and “a force for government integrity and public confidence.”

That was Bill Clinton.

What a long, strange trip it’s been from that July day in 1994 to the recent day in Phoenix, when former president Clinton marched across a hot airport tarmac and up the stairs of Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s private plane for a 30-minute private chat with the woman who would decide whether his wife would face criminal charges.

The independent counsel law expired in 1999, but President Obama could have appointed a special prosecutor for the email investigation. He declined to do so, as he declined to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS targeting of conservative nonprofit groups two years ago.

A different decision would have been, in Bill Clinton’s words, “a force for government integrity and public confidence.”

When FBI Director James Comey announced that he was recommending no criminal charges against Hillary Clinton, he carefully explained facts that proved she has repeatedly lied to the American people.

And here’s why that matters.

Governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” That’s in the Declaration of Independence.

Officials who lie to the public and candidates who lie to get elected cannot claim to have the consent of the governed. They’re not exercising the government’s “just powers.” They’re dealing in raw, arbitrary power.

Without honesty in government and the transparency and accountability of laws like the Freedom of Information Act, there is nothing to prevent the immense powers of the state from being used selectively and coercively to help friends and destroy enemies. That’s how it’s done in countries where there is no freedom.

So if you mock the importance of honesty in government, if you make it secondary to policy or party or power, then you are contributing to the erosion of justice and freedom in America.

And that’s how free countries destroy themselves.