No Island of Sanity: Paula Jones v. Bill Clinton: The Supreme Court on Trial
160No Island of Sanity: Paula Jones v. Bill Clinton: The Supreme Court on Trial
160Paperback
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Overview
Each book is long enough to get to the heart of the subject, short enough to read in one sitting. Some are think pieces. Some are research oriented. Some are journalistic in nature. The form is wide open, but the aim is the same: to say things that need saying. Appearing on a monthly basis, the titles in The Library of Contemporary Thought will excite anyone interested in the most pressing issues of the day.
"I cannot credit the Court with balancing the interests of Paula Jones and the public without thereby convicting them of something more damning. Because if this is true, their sense of importance and priorities, their sense of values and balance is so askew, so defective, that they think one citizen's right to have her day in court, not just eventually but right now, is absolute and more important than the rights of the 260,000,000 people of this nation to have the Office of the Presidency functioning effectively every day of the year".
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780345424877 |
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Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 02/17/1998 |
Series: | Library of Contemporary Thought |
Pages: | 160 |
Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Date of Birth:
August 14, 1934Date of Death:
June 6, 2015Place of Birth:
Hibbing, MNPlace of Death:
Los Angeles, CAEducation:
University of Miami (1956); UCLA Law School (1964)Read an Excerpt
...I have yet to read one single article, anywhere, criticizing the Supreme Court for its ruling in the case. (In fact, as we will see later on, even many who were upset with the Court's ruling and regretted its potential adverse implications went on to conclude that the Court was nevertheless legally correct in its ruling.) But by the time readers finish this book I'm confident that most of them will be highly condemnatory of the Supreme Court, some even angry at the Court, for its ruling in the Paula Jones case.
About no one else seeing the error: Let me qualify this. I would guess that some constitutional law professors, somewhere, saw it. But I can tell you who didn'tno one in the media that I'm aware of, including the major newspapers of the land and political pundits, saw it. The president's own lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, didn't see it. Much more important, the Supreme
Court of the United States, which handed down the ruling, didn't see it. As a result, the highest court in our land made an incomprehensible and terribly flawed decision against the nation's most powerful and important citizen, one that has injurious ramifications for all of us.
It should be noted off the top that the position taken in this book has nothing at all to do with being pro-Clinton or pro-Democrat. It has everything to do with the office of the presidency of the United States. In fact, during Watergate, with a Republican president, I became so upset with people treating the matter as though it was so much more serious than it really was (prosecutor Leon Jaworski, incredibly, analogized it to the Third Reich, which resulted, as we know, in fifty million deaths during World War II, including the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust) and with politicians (who, if the truth be told, had covered up their own misconduct) reacting with phony horror over the president's malfeasances (e.g., Senator Ted Kennedy, who did everything within his power to suppress the facts of Chappaquiddick) that I wanted to write a book titled Watergate: America's Finest Hour of Hypocrisy, but prior commitments prevented me from doing so.
I believe I can establish conclusively that the Supreme Court's decision in this case was terribly and demonstrably wrong. The reason is that the Court failed to balance, as it must always do, the public interest against the private interest; here, the public interest in the effective functioning of the office of the presidency against the private interest of Paula Jones to have her case heard, without further delay, during the president's term in office. One could perhaps say that because I am not a constitutional scholar or even an appellate lawyer, just a plain trial lawyer, I am out of my depth in taking on the highest court in the land in this case. But in this instance, the Jones v. Clinton case, the depth is so shallow that anyone using even an ounce of common sense could navigate its weak currents. This is not the type of situation where the Supreme Court has issued a ruling with which those who disagree question the Court's analysis and interpretation of the legal issues before it. This happens every day; people see things differently all the time. This is a situation where, for instance, the judge of a professional fight never even added up his scorecard correctly, giving only one point, instead of the two he should have, to a knockdown in the third round. In other words, this is a ruling that is fatally defective, one no rational person can fail to condemn once he or she becomes aware of what the Supreme Court actually did in this case. The error was so flagrant that virtually everyone should have seen it. But they didn't.
And that leads me, before we get into a fairly detailed examination of the Court's decision, into a discussion of two prefatory matters, the first of which is to try to explain why no one whom I'm aware of has been talking about the Supreme Court's terrible blunder in the Paula Jones case (and by extension, why no one saw the incompetence of the prosecutors in the
Simpson case). The second concerns a frightening reality about the direction of American life.