At last week's impeachment hearings, liberal constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe of Harvard was one of the star witnesses called by the Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. But he wasn't treated as a star witness. At least not by his lights. And he let the committee's Democratic staffers hear about it, in an e-mail that was subsequently leaked to the Washington Post's Al Kamen. It's priceless:
Dear Mr. Ramsey:
I appreciate the fact that the witness list finally contains a correct spelling of my name, but it continues to disturb me that the witnesses being called by the majority are accorded the respect of being listed with their professional titles whereas those of us being called at the suggestion of the minority are listed with nothing more than our institutional affiliations.
As you may know, I'm the Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard University Law School; I hold the only chair in constitutional law at that institution. It seems to me quite unfair, and in a sense misleading, for the press and the public to be told, for instance, that my colleague Richard Parker is a Professor of Law at Harvard and to know only that I have some unspecified link to that same institution -- an institution at which it is I, and not Richard, who hold the chair in constitutional law; or to know that Gary McDowell, to pick just one other example, is Director of the Institute of U.S. Studies at the University of London -- whatever it is that the institute does -- while being left to guess what sort of post Cass Sunstein holds at Chicago or Susan Block holds at Georgetown, and to speculate whether Father Drinan is Georgetown University's chaplain or holds some other, more relevant, position. This is perhaps only a matter of principle since most of us are more or less familiar to the press if not to the public, but matters of principle should count for something in this context, and my several efforts to raise this matter through my assistant Jeff Jamison have produced neither a correction of the list through inclusion of the appropriate titles nor an explanation of why this request cannot be honored while it remains timely.
Let me thank you in advance for whatever you can do about this little annoyance, and let me also apologize if you think I am being petty in a setting where truly important things, and not mere titles, are at stake.
Wow. A matter of principle. If Laurence Tribe hasn't shown himself to be perfectly qualified to be the next Democratic nominee to the Supreme Court, THE SCRAPBOOK doesn't know who is.