Category Archives: Newsweek

Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s Newsweek media appearances.

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A Supreme Moment

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Newsweek

The crowd outside the Supreme Court last Friday was the perfect picture of America in the days since the election–loud, bawdy and rude. A scrappy throng of Bush and Gore supporters, kept carefully at bay by a team of uniformed officers, waved their signs–sore loserman!–and shouted their slogans–"G.W.B., how many votes did you steal from me?" Inside the muted, high-ceilinged marble temple, the scene was more like opening night at the Kennedy Center. In the days before the hearing, all of elite Washington had gently elbowed for scarce tickets to the hottest show in town. Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg chatted with her uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, who mingled with legal lion Lloyd Cutler and Sen. Orrin Hatch. Al Gore’s children were there, taking it in from the good seats.

At a few seconds before 10, the cocktail-party chatter was quickly hushed, and soon forgotten, as the nine justices appeared on the elevated bench and the arguments began. Ninety long, combative minutes later, the early predictions that the court would bring quick finality to the election mess seemed unlikely indeed. So did the confident assertions by the Gore camp and so many legal "experts" that the justices would slap down Bush’s case and side overwhelmingly with the Florida Supreme Court–paving the way for more recounts that might put the vice president over the top. Once again this case reminded us of the immutable truth about the court: Predict at Your Peril.

For the argument’s first 45 minutes, the justices–including the more conservative ones–seemed to have Bush lawyer Theodore B. Olson and his colleagues on the ropes, asking tough, skeptical questions. It appeared to many that Gore would coast to a smashing victory. But that abruptly changed in the 45 minutes that followed. While the four m…

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Here Come The Justices

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Newsweek

Don’t believe anyone who claims to know how the Supreme Court will rule in the election mess. Despite all the handicapping by so-called legal experts on TV, it’s a good bet that few, if any, of the justices know yet which side they’ll come down on after this Friday’s hearing. The decision they have to make is whether Florida’s Democratic Supreme Court wrongly rewrote state law when it extended the hand-count deadline and required the results to be included in the state’s official tally. The answer is not self-evident–though the Republican lawyers who brought the appeal have a heavy burden of proof to shoulder. The justices are no doubt aware that their ruling could determine, once and for all, the outcome of the presidential campaign. Their opinion could be surprising–and, despite differences the justices might have behind closed doors, they will probably strive to achieve unanimity.

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The Legal Road Ahead

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Newsweek

Depending on how you count them, there are now at least nine separate lawsuits fueling the postelection feud in Florida. Al Gore’s legal team – seizing on the confusing Palm Beach County ballot that may have caused thousands of Gore supporters to accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan – is searching for a way to prevent the vote count from being officially certified. On Saturday the Bush camp fired off a shot of its own, filing a federal lawsuit to prevent a Gore-requested hand recount of ballots in Palm Beach and other counties. Teams of lawyers for both sides have descended on south Florida to pore over election statutes for anything that might give them a foothold in court. “We’re preparing for a full-blown legal fight,” says Ron Meyer, a Democratic election-law attorney from Tallahassee.

Just how long that battle will last is hard to say. At some point Gore – or Bush – could decide that the fight is too damaging to himself and the country and concede the race. If neither does, the lawyers could drag this thing out for weeks or even months.

The Democrats got a break last week when state circuit court Judge Kathleen Kroll issued what may have been the first court order in history freezing the results of a presidential election, barring local officials from certifying Palm Beach County’s ballots at least until a hearing this week. At first, Democratic lawyers had filed their case in federal court in West Palm Beach, where they were assigned a Reagan-appointed judge, Kenneth Ryskamp. The lawyers soon dropped the case there and refiled in state circuit court, where they drew Kroll – a liberal Democrat married to a Clinton-appointed Labor Department official. That doesn’t, of course, mean Kroll will be an automatic pushover for the Democrats. But some Republicans have complained that the Gore side is shopping for sympathetic judges.

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A Voter’s Panic Guide

by Stuart Taylor, Jr., et al.

Newsweek

Prescription Drugs Bush and Gore both have plans to help the estimated 13 million seniors who lack prescription-drug coverage–and the candidates offer voters a real choice of approaches. The Gore plan, costing $253 billion through 2010, adds a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare. After paying a $25 monthly premium, a senior would be reimbursed half of all drug bills up to a maximum of $5,000 in bills per year. In addition, the plan would cover all prescription payments exceeding $4,000 in out-of-pocket costs per year.

Bush’s plan, less clear on the details, has a price tag of $158 billion. He says he will work with Congress to reform Medicare. Until then, he will provide $48 billion to the states to help low-income seniors pay for their drugs. The rest of the money would cover at least 25 percent of the premiums for seniors buying health insurance, including drug coverage, from private insurers or Medicare. All prescriptions are covered after $6,000 in out-of-pocket expenses. Both plans, which are voluntary, cover pre-existing conditions and pay all costs for seniors with incomes below $11,300.

As an expansion of Medicare, Gore’s plan builds on an imperfect but generally dependable system that serves some 39 million seniors. Bush’s plan, preferred by drugmakers and insurance companies, is intended to offer seniors wider choices.

– David Noonan

Social Security Both candidates are discussing Social Security’s long-term problems, which is good. But neither will admit publicly that the only way to manage the baby boomers’ retirement is to raise Social Security taxes to the moon, increase the retirement age and scale back benefits in other ways, or to stuff trillions of dollars into the system.

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The Supreme Question

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Newsweek

Al Gore saw his opening, and he took it. Campaigning last Wednesday in Backlick, Ohio, the vice president unexpectedly tossed aside the top of a scheduled speech about energy and the environment and instead launched into a passionate lecture about the importance of the Supreme Court. All morning, Gore had been asking aides to inform him as soon as the court handed down its expected final opinions of the year. At about 11 a.m., just as Air Force Two was touching down in Ohio, he got the news he’d been waiting to hear: the justices had struck down laws in 31 states banning so-called partial-birth abortions, the controversial late-term procedure denounced by abortion opponents. But the vote was close–5-4–and the vice president couldn’t wait to seize the opportunity to raise doubts about George W. Bush. The vice president immediately reworked his speech. “The next president will nominate… perhaps four justices to the Supreme Court,” Gore warned in the new, improved text. “One extra vote on the wrong side,” he said, “would change the outcome, and a woman’s right to choose would be taken away.”

Gore’s warning was an exaggeration, to say the least. In fact, six of the nine current justices have supported fairly broad abortion rights. Still, Bush chose to downplay the decision, wary of being dragged into an abortion brawl that could put him on the wrong side of public opinion, sending moderate voters–especially women–fleeing. But he couldn’t avoid the matter entirely: Bush issued a terse statement saying he would “fight for a ban on partial-birth abortion.” Later in the week he cut a deal to keep the GOP’s hard-line anti-abortion plank in the party’s platform.

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The Supremes In The Dock

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Newsweek

It has become a familiar pattern. When the Supreme Court ruled last week that cities and states can ban nude dancing in clubs, the vote was close (6-3), and the conservatives won. And when the Supreme Court knocked down the White House’s hard-nosed efforts to regulate the tobacco industry last month, the justices were even more closely divided (5-4) – conservatives against liberals. In recent months, that 5-4 split has allowed the court’s conservatives to narrowly prevail in cases limiting the rights of defendants facing the death penalty, making it easier for police to stop people who flee when approached and restricting the federal government’s power to make states draw election districts that benefit black or Hispanic candidates.

That tenuous balance of power may soon change. The 5-4 split that has defined the court in recent years could be altered with the replacement of a single justice. And since it seems likely that one or more justices will retire in the coming four years, the next president may have the rare opportunity to sharply tip the court’s scales to the right or left, perhaps for decades to come. Until recently, the Supremes have remained a sleeper issue in the presidential race. But as the sparring intensifies, the battle over the future of the court could emerge as one of the most hotly contested issues of the campaign.

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Why The Story Matters

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Newsweek

The most important cocaine question for George W. Bush is this: would you seek long prison terms for today’s 18-year-olds for doing what you say you may or may not have done as a young man–and when you now suggest that whatever you did was a mere youthful indiscretion, and thus irrelevant to your candidacy?

Countless thousands of people are rotting in prisons all across America–many in Texas–for being caught with small amounts of cocaine or crack, its smokable variant. Many were only peripherally involved in drug sales. Some were mere users. As governor of Texas, Bush–like most other politicians in both parties–has joined in this orgy of punishment with enthusiasm, signing laws that toughen penalties for drug users as well as pushers, and that send juveniles as young as 14 to prison for especially serious crimes, including some drug crimes.

How can he square this with his position that whether he used drugs is irrelevant to his candidacy? If Bush won’t tell us whether he used cocaine or other illegal drugs in his first 28 years–and there’s no evidence that he did–he should at least tell us whether his admitted but unspecified “young and irresponsible” escapades would have landed him in prison had the drug laws he supports been enforced against him.

In 1997 Bush signed a measure authorizing judges to give jail time to people convicted of possessing (or selling) less than one gram (one twenty-eighth of an ounce) of cocaine. Texas sentencing guidelines had previously prescribed mandatory probation for such small quantities. And in 1995, Bush pushed through the new law expanding the list of crimes for which juveniles as young as 14 (down from 15) can be tried and imprisoned as adults.

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Making The War-Criminal Case

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Newsweek

In the early hours of April 2, little more than a week after the start of NATO’s bombing campaign, a 14-year-old Kosovar girl named Dalina Caka huddled in the basement of a house in Djakovica’s Qerim district. With her were 18 other women and children, and one man. Outside, Serb police were on a killing-and-burning raid. When the rampaging troops discovered Dalina and the others, they “shot the 20 occupants and then set the house on fire,” killing everyone, according to the war-crimes indictment of Slobodan Milosevic and four of his top henchmen. The indictment lists hundreds of atrocities like these alleged murders in Qerim. Now the challenge for prosecutors–if they can ever get custody of the Serb defendants–is building a chain of evidence that links such crimes to Milosevic’s actions in Belgrade.

Milosevic’s moral responsibility is beyond dispute. The brutal and bloody Serb campaign to “cleanse” Kosovo of ethnic Albanians has been so pervasive and prolonged that it is impossible to view the man in charge as a bystander. Establishing criminal guilt, though, requires rigorous proof. The indictment, prepared by prosecutors of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in The Hague, outlines two ways of making the case.

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At War In Jones V. Clinton

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Newsweek

FOR A LEGAL DOCUMENT, the language is raw. ""Please admit or deny the following,” says the ""request for admissions” served on President Clinton last week. ""While he was governor of the state of Arkansas, Defendant Clinton had sexual relations with women (other than Hillary Rodham Clinton) and members of the Arkansas State Police arranged meetings between Defendant Clinton and the women.”

Jones v. Clinton, never pretty, is turning uglier. Do such filings confirm contentions by Robert Bennett, the president’s lawyer, that ""this is an effort, this whole case, to embarrass and humiliate the president” in a campaign bankrolled by his political enemies? There’s no doubt that members of the Jones camp delight in seeking to embarrass and humiliate Bill Clinton. And there’s no doubt that some of those now supporting Jones, like the Rutherford Institute, have conservative leanings. But as a matter of law, questions about Clinton’s alleged past now appear somewhat more relevant than they did before.

Whether the questions will have to be answered is up to Judge Susan Webber Wright, who must decide which to allow before trial, now set for next May. What relevant evidence could be sought from women with whom Clinton has allegedly had consensual extramarital relations? Not much, it seemed, un…

FOR A LEGAL DOCUMENT, the language is raw. ""Please admit or deny the following,” says the ""request for admissions” served on President Clinton last week. ""While he was governor of the state of Arkansas, Defendant Clinton had sexual relations with women (other than Hillary Rodham Clinton) and members of the Arkansas State Police arranged meetings between Defendant Clinton and the women.”Jones v. Clinton, never pretty, is turning uglier. Do such filings confirm contentions by Robert Bennet

FOR A LEGAL DOCUMENT, the language is raw. ""Please admit or deny the …

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The Facts Of The Matter

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Newsweek

PUT ASIDE, FOR A MOMENT, ALL THE POLITICAL WAR-GAM- ing and the hotel-room titillation. At heart, just how strong a case does Paula Jones have? The answer changes depending on whether you focus on facts or law, and on which facts are most important to you. One relevant comparison: Jones’s evidence that Bill Clinton did what she says he did seems stronger than Anita Hill’s rather weak evidence of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. Remember, too, that Hill accused Thomas of nothing worse than persistently pestering her for dates and talking dirty over a two-year period when he was her boss. No touching, no flashing, no request for sex. It surprises many people, but the fine print in Jones’s suit is more compelling than you might think. That’s what has the president scrambling for a strategy – and much of the country taking a second, more sympathetic look at Paula Jones.

Facts are what happened; law is the set of rules you apply to that evidence. On the facts, Jones’s suit seems strongest on her claim that on May 8, 1991, Clinton had her interrupted on the job and delivered to him for some kind of sexual overture. It is less convincing, but hardly frivolous, on Jones’s allegations that she spurned Clinton and he persisted by exposing himself and requesting oral sex. It seems most vulnerable on her assertion that she was treated badly at work for having rebuffed her boss’s boss.

On the law – which is far from clear on what it takes to prove illegal sexual harassment – the bottom line is that many judges would probab…