Let’s see if we’ve got this straight. It is legally actionable — a tort — when blue-collar workers paste girlie posters inside their lockers. It is a tort when white-collar workers display beach-scene photographs of their wives on office desks. But when the governor of Arkansas dispatches an Arkansas state trooper to fetch him an Arkansas state employee so that he might brandish his Arkansas genitals before that employee and ask her to “kiss it” . . . well, that is not a tort. In fact, according to Judge Susan Webber Wright, Bill Clinton’s concupiscent assault on Paula Jones in 1991 doesn’t even constitute an “outrage” under relevant law.
What could this possibly mean? Could Judge Wright’s decision to throw the Jones complaint out of court signal a new standard in sexual-misconduct litigation? Could the Anita Hill era finally be over? Could it be that workplace overtures much, much milder than Clinton’s will no longer routinely trigger fat cash settlements — and feminist speechifying about how men “just don’t get it”?
No such luck, we’re guessing. Where sex-harassment is concerned, Jones v. Clinton will prove a one-time-only special. There is no new standard here. There is only the old, sickeningly familiar one — the one that seems always to exempt Bill Clinton from the ordinary rules of behavior that govern everyone else less favored by Gloria Steinem. Clinton is king. The king is different.
And now the king’s sycophantic courtiers are arguing that his Jones– established droit de seigneur in civil law must be extended to immunity for criminal violations as well — that Judge Wright’s ruling must somehow force Kenneth Starr to shut down his independent-counsel investigation into the White House of Ill Repute and thereby allow the country to return to “normal.” The news media, reflecting a classic Age of Clinton confusion about the distinction between public relations and propriety, seem helpless before this argument. It is suddenly “inconceivable,” a New York Times front-page news analysis declares, that Congress will ever mount impeachment proceedings concerning the president’s “alleged lies and obstruction in a case that no longer exists.”
As a technical matter, this is plainly wrong. Bill Clinton’s lies and obstruction — the Times’s “alleged” is a darkly comic touch — have never been restricted to the Jones case. Remember Whitewater? The Whitewater ” phase” of Starr’s investigation, which has already secured multiple guilty pleas and felony convictions, is now in its final weeks. That Little Rock grand jury is finishing its work amid open speculation that further indictments will be released. Then, for that matter, there is Travelgate and the FBI-files fiasco.
And then finally, too, there remains Paula Jones. Examined carefully, it seems to us, Judge Wright’s 39-page dismissal order is not nearly the slam- dunk legal opinion it purports to be. If Jones decides to pursue an appeal, there is a fair chance that the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will reverse Wright’s ruling and order the case to trial.
But even if that doesn’t happen, Jones v. Clinton will continue to challenge the nation’s criminal law and constitutional order. Paula Jones, whatever the merits of her claim against the president, is history’s designated flashlight on the basement soul of Bill Clinton’s White House. Already revealed has been the worst infestation of executive-branch termites since 1974. The bugs are still down there, gnawing away at the institutional foundations of American public life. Will we let them be, or clean them out?
Forget what happened at the Excelsior Hotel in 1991; that has never been the paramount issue. Because of the Jones litigation, there is overwhelming, unrebutted, O. J. Simpson-quality circumstantial evidence that William Jefferson Clinton, while president of the United States, has:
PCommitted felony perjury in a court-supervised deposition;
PEncouraged, abetted, or knowingly benefited from the perjury of others;
PEncouraged, abetted, or knowingly benefited from schemes to withhold truthful testimony and documentary evidence from the Jones court and from Ken Starr’s federal grand jury;
PSupervised a White House staff that systematically used its public power and the public purse to facilitate and conceal these crimes — and to smear and delegitimize anyone who knew, reported, or complained about them.
It is all there, right in front of our noses. It is a conspiracy to obstruct justice. It is not made “okay” by the fact that Paula Jones may have lost her standing before Susan Webber Wright. And the stupid mood swings of Washington media types to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not going to go away any time soon.
The independent-counsel investigation continues, as law and order demand. The White House has recently and ludicrously asserted an executive-privilege claim to block grand-jury testimony by Clinton aides Bruce Lindsey and Sidney Blumenthal. Starr and his colleagues will litigate that claim all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. They will win. And then, we suspect, Lindsey and Blumenthal will either corroborate damaging evidence the grand jury has already reviewed, or lie about it and get caught.
Before that happens, there will be grand-jury testimony by Linda Tripp. Monica Lewinsky, “that woman” with whom the president swears he had no ” improper sexual relationship,” will testify or be indicted. And sometime soon, maybe as early as next month, Kenneth Starr’s office will deliver to Congress — and by extension, to the country as a whole — a full, interim report on his entire multi-faceted inquiry. What we know already is plenty bad enough. What we are bound to learn as the weeks roll by is surely even worse.
No doubt the dismissal of Jones v. Clinton is a victory of spin control for the president. No doubt his current popularity makes Republicans in Congress nervous. No doubt the country is embarrassed and impatient over the continuing, sex-fraught spectacle of Clinton’s crimes and misdemeanors.
But it is not — must not — be the case that a final, formal accounting for those crimes and misdemeanors has become “inconceivable.” We are not really a monarchy. Bill Clinton is not really our king. Not yet, anyway.
