Is it just THE SCRAPBOOK's imagination, or did President Clinton (echoing his reference to "that woman, Miss Lewinsky") almost trip over his tongue last Friday morning and call Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals "that judge"?
The day before, Silberman had delivered his memorable spanking to the administration for its attempts to invent a "protective function" privilege that would prevent Secret Service agents from testifying to Kenneth Starr's grand jury. Silberman acidly noted that the independent counsel "stands in place of the Attorney General and represents the United States in any proceeding within his or her jurisdiction" and that, therefore, Janet Reno had no "standing," as the lawyers like to say, to represent the Secret Service agents. Nonetheless, "on the first page of the brief [Reno] purports to represent the United States." According to the independent-counsel statute, Silberman went on, it is up to Starr -- "the surrogate Attorney General in this matter -- to decide whether the 'privilege' asserted by the Secret Service as a government entity should be recognized."
All in all, Silberman delivered himself of a sophisticated sermon on the separation of powers, which because it also included some good soundbites like "constitutional absurdity" seems to have sailed over the heads of quite a few people, including the most famous former professor of constitutional law in America, Bill Clinton, Yale Law, 1973. The next morning Clinton spluttered in his almost-reference to that judge: "I mean, that -- the judge should -- can have a right to his legal opinion about what the Treasury Department and the Justice Department said, but I have told you that this case is about their professional judgment about what's necessary to do their job." A right to his legal opinion? Sounds like he's been watching too much Greta Van Susteren.