LET’S BE STRAIGHT about the whack the Supreme Court took at President Clinton in the Paula Jones case. It was a big one. Normally the court has a bias in favor of executive power. At least some justices are willing to side with the White House in almost every circumstance. President Truman got three justices to go along in 1952 with his bid to nationalize the steel industry. President Nixon got three in his unsuccessful effort to block publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Nixon got five votes in 1982 to ward off a lawsuit by Ernest Fitzgerald, a Defense Department official fired for revealing cost overruns on the C5A transport plane. President Roosevelt got six votes in 1944 when the court upheld his right to intern Japanese- Americans. Clinton got zero votes. Only Nixon did this poorly and that was when he tried to block prosecutors from obtaining White House tapes in the Watergate criminal case in 1974.
Still, Clinton may have gotten all that he and his attorney, Robert Bennett, had hoped for. Dick Morris says the constitutional argument that a president can’t be sued while in office was concocted to sidetrack the case until Clinton was safely reelected. “This was basically a trumped-up argument that Bennett threw together at the last minute to get this thing until after the election,” Morris said on the Fox News Channel. “And of course by 9-0 it had no legal merit. I never thought it had any legal merit. But the point was, we weren’t going to let this thing be adjudicated in August, October, November, near the election.” Morris should know. He was Clinton’s chief political strategist in 1995 and 1996.
Clinton nearly succeeded in delaying the case even longer, says Joseph Cammarata, one of Jones’s lawyers. The president’s side asked for a 30-day delay in filing its brief with the Supreme Court, saying it needed to add two constitutional experts to Clinton’s legal team. Jones’s attorneys opposed the postponement, and the justices agreed. If it had been granted, the delay would have put the case off until the court’s next term, beginning in October, according to Cammarata.
So now what? A settlement of Jones’s suit, which charges Clinton lured her to a hotel room in Little Rock in 1991, exposed himself, and sought oral sex, is logical. Certainly Clinton won’t want to take the stand or even be deposed as a defendant in a sexual-harassment case. But reaching a settlement may not be easy. At their press conference following the May 27 ruling, Jones’s lawyers left the impression that she only wants the president to acknowledge she did nothing wrong or improper when they met in the hotel room. Now, they insist Jones requires more than that. First, the president must apologize, Cammarata says. And that must be accompanied by “a statement that will underscore or affirm her truthfulness with respect to this incident and the fact that she did nothing wrong.” Agreeing to her “truthfulness” would be the hard part for Clinton. In effect, he would be endorsing her account of events at the hotel and admitting he made a crude sexual advance. “If [Clinton] wants to shut down the case, he’s got to give me what my client wants,” Cammarata says.
This goes beyond the settlement that lawyers for Clinton and Jones discussed just before she filed suit in 1994. The statement under consideration then, Cammarata says, had Clinton saying he didn’t remember meeting Jones but wasn’t challenging her assertion about what may have happened in 1991. It also made clear that she hadn’t acted in a sexual or improper manner and noted Clinton’s regret that untrue comments had been made about Jones. Cammarata says Clinton’s lawyers had approved the statement, but Jones’s hadn’t. “It wasn’t enough then and it isn’t now,” he says.
The Supreme Court ruling gives Jones considerable leverage in pursuing the case, and her lawyers vow to use it to the hilt. For one thing, Gammarata is pressuring reporters to pepper Clinton with questions on whether he went to the hotel room, was alone with Jones, and made advances. For another, he intends to try to substantiate “a pattern of conduct where thengovernor Clinton has used state troopers, at state expense, for his own personal enjoyment and, in particular, for the procurement of women.” This is a line of inquiry that Clinton certainly doesn’t relish. Given the schedule outlined by Judge Susan Wright, the case should come to trial no later than next spring, unless sidetracked again by Clinton.
For its part, the White House doesn’t want to talk about Paula Jones at all. Clinton says only that the case is in Bennett’s hands. Even Mark Penn, the president’s pollster, is muzzled. Though he polled for Clinton extensively last year and in 1995 and still conducts national surveys twice a month, Penn said he doesn’t recall whether he’s ever asked a question about Paula Jones or her allegations. Nonetheless, Penn said Clinton’s popularity won’t dip because the public will see the case as “diverting Washington from its central mission.” The court decision? “A procedural matter will not in any way affect the president’s standing or image,” he said. But he didn’t sound too sure.
Fred Barnes is executive director of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
