8/30/00 11:50 a.m.
Disbar Clinton!
And that's just for starters.

By Ann Coulter, legal columnist for Human Events & a syndicated columnist with Universal Press Syndicate

resident Bill Clinton's lawyers filed a response in his disbarment case this week, denouncing the disbarment sanction as "excessively harsh, impermissibly punitive, and unprecedented in the circumstances of this case."

Abstracted from the fact that Clinton is the president and his law-breaking legendary, it is difficult to make out a clear legal standard for disbarment. Precedents are all over the map. The problem is, lawyers hate to discipline themselves. But they would also prefer if those outside the practice remain under the illusion that lawyers are subject to rigorous ethical standards.

If ever there were a case for disbarment, Clinton's is it. If perjuring oneself before a federal judge, suborning the perjury of others, and otherwise obstructing justice is not enough, then nothing can ever warrant disbarment. And to have done all this while president of the United States — without disbarment — will not do much to further the illusion that lawyers are required to abide by any ethical standards.

Though you wouldn't know it from watching TV lawyers, lawyers as a group tended to be more appalled than any other professional subset by the president's lawbreaking. Certain highly regarded federal judges are known, for example, to refer to the president exclusively as "that felon" when in the privacy of their chambers.

If what Clinton did is acceptable, there is no point to what lawyers have chosen to do with their lives. Lawyers across the country feel the way doctors might feel if Western science failed — and voodoo worked — in a particularly sensational case. In Clinton's case, the law failed — and criminality worked.

Yes, it's true, some people have always lied in court. But there has got to be a sense that most of the time, most people will not baldly perjure themselves in the presence of federal judges, or the entire practice of law is a joke.

This is why, for example, one of the ethics complaints filed with the Arkansas Supreme Court against Clinton was lodged by Judge Susan Webber Wright herself. Indeed, in order to stem frivolous arguments that Clinton's perjury was not "material," Judge Wright specifically wrote in her opinion holding Clinton in contempt that the president had given "intentionally false" testimony about "material" facts.

Still, Clinton's lawyers and media flacks continue to trot out the old saw about his lies not being "material" to the underlying suit (a demonstrably false claim even at the time that did, however, manage to dupe Representative Lindsey Graham).

Judge Wright, who presided over that suit, explicitly stated in her disbarment referral: "Contrary to numerous assertions, this court did not rule that evidence of the Lewinsky matter was irrelevant or immaterial to the issues in the [Jones] case. Indeed, the court specifically acknowledged that such evidence might have been relevant to the plaintiff's case."

More strikingly than Judge Wright's opinion, however, is the opinion of the nine most powerful lawyers in the nation, as evidenced by an incident that has been almost completely forgotten.

When President Clinton gave his first State of the Union address after being acquitted by the Senate in his impeachment trial, not one single Supreme Court Justice showed up. Not even the Justices he appointed. Not one. Never before has the entire Supreme Court boycotted a president's scheduled State of the Union address.

And never has such a bold, unmistakable statement by the Court gone so unremarked upon. In a note to the House sergeant of arms, the Justices said simply: "No justices will be in attendance but they do thank you for the invitation." The Justices' polite little excuses were accepted at face value, as well as the note's purported explanation, which claimed that "Justices of the court had planned to attend the State of the Union address," but — as luck would have it — "travel changes and minor illnesses have intervened."

The absence of every single member of the Supreme Court from Clinton's address was such a breathtaking, astonishing statement that it now seems like a dream. But great institutions do have vitality, and the Justices rose to the dignity of their offices by refusing to attend a felon's ceremonial speech as if nothing were amiss. Something is amiss when a common criminal sits in the Oval Office.

That one act of refusal by the Supreme Court is more telling than any disbarment cases from Pulaski County, Ark., more telling than Judge Wright's disbarment recommendation, more telling than federal judges' denunciations of the president as a felon, and certainly more telling than the Congressional Democrats' partisan and obdurate refusal to do their constitutional duty.

We can learn nothing new about President Clinton now. How the Arkansas judge rules on Clinton's disbarment will tell us something only about the judge.