It turns out that the taxpayers of New York reimbursed Assemblyman Dov Hikind $420,000 to cover legal fees connected with his defense against the corruption charges that federal prosecutors had brought against him. “The fee seemed high,” one lawyer for the state of New York muttered in an internal memo about the bill obtained by City Limits. Yet it was for extraordinarily effective representation from the attorney who won Mr. Hikind’s acquittal, Gustave Newman. Meantime, President and Senator Clinton want taxpayers to reimburse them for some of the legal bills they incurred with the likes of Williams & Connolly. Though the total — in the millions — might seem high, it was for brilliant representation that won acquittal of the president in the Senate in the face of one of the most expensive and determined prosecutions in history. Nor is it just Democrats who are benefiting from laws that allow public officials to recover certain defense costs. Taxpayers covered $562,111 of President Reagan’s legal costs in the Iran-Contra affair. Cheap, we might add, at the price.

Which raises the question of why court-appointed defense lawyers for the indigent in New York were getting paid $25 an hour for out-of-court work and $40 an hour in the courtroom. Recently, a judge raised that to $90 an hour, still chump change compared to the fees of the Clintons and Hikinds of the world. If advocates of higher pay for indigent defenders want to really get some wind behind their cause, they could propose a new law — call it the Hillary-Hikind provision — that sets a cap on the amount taxpayers will compensate politicians for their lawyers. The cap could be set at exactly the rate earned by those lawyers who defend the common folk.

The politicians argued when they passed the laws providing for these reimbursements that they are more likely to be subject to frivolous prosecutions than the common man. That’s not an argument likely to resonate with some poor schlump who managed to get acquitted of a criminal charge. The politicians also might argue that because their legal bills get paid only in certain circumstances (such as acquittal), the situation is different from indigent defense, where lawyers get paid by the state even if the clients plead guilty or are found guilty. But the right to counsel enshrined in the Sixth Amendment applies not only to innocent defendants, but to guilty ones — and to the ones that might be guilty if they had a $25-an-hour lawyer but might be not guilty if they had a lawyer in the league of those who defended the Clintons and Mr. Hikind.