The Nine [64]
The location of the poker game rotated among the homes of the players, and Rehnquist always took a turn hosting at his modest town house in suburban Arlington, Virginia. The game unfolded according to a precise ritual. From 7:00 to 7:45 p.m., the players would arrive and eat sandwiches provided by the host. The game would last from 8:00 to 11:00. Small talk was kept to a minimum. (Robert Bork joined the game briefly, but he quit because no one wanted to talk about anything except poker.) For many years, everyone used only first names, but after Rehnquist became chief justice in 1986, the other players started calling him “Chief.” They also deferred to him to resolve any disputes that came up during the game. The stakes were low but not penny-ante; a player could win or lose about a hundred dollars in a night. (When Rehnquist was nominated to be chief justice, Bennett discreetly assigned an associate at his firm to research whether the game ran afoul of any gambling ordinances in the District of Columbia, Virginia, or Maryland. The search revealed no problems, and no one ever raised the issue anyway. This was fortunate for Rehnquist, because he also ran the Court’s betting pools on NCAA basketball, NFL football, and the Kentucky Derby.)
In May 1994, three months after Paula Jones made her first accusations of improper conduct by Clinton, the president hired Bennett to defend him in the sexual harassment lawsuit she had just filed. The players in the poker game generally avoided the subject of the Supreme Court, but Bennett thought the matter was so high-profile—and so likely to wind up in front of the justices—that he decided to withdraw from the game for the duration of his representation of the president. Scalia in particular tried to talk Bennett out of leaving, but Bennett thought the caution was prudent. He was correct, as on January 13, 1997, he found himself standing before the nine justices to argue the case of Clinton v. Jones.
At first the Jones case united the justices—against Clinton. The case gave most of them an outlet for their long-standing personal distaste for the president. Shortly after Clinton was first elected, a clerk told Rehnquist that the new president was thinking of nominating his wife as attorney general. “They say Caligula appointed his horse consul of Rome,” the chief replied dryly. O’Connor was almost physically repelled by the sordid nature of Jones’s allegations against Clinton; his behavior, as alleged, defined her all-purpose expression of distaste: unattractive. Stevens and Souter likewise found the matter unseemly and would rather have dealt with almost any other subject. Scalia and Thomas were all but openly hostile to Clinton and his agenda. And Clinton’s own nominees, Ginsburg and Breyer, had to avoid looking like they were favoring the man who appointed them.
There may have been a high principle at stake in Clinton v. Jones, but the facts of the case resembled a trailer-park sitcom more than a Supreme Court case. In brief, Jones alleged that on May 8, 1991, she was sitting at the registration desk for Governor Clinton’s Quality Management conference at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock. Clinton saw Jones, then named Paula Corbin, and asked one of his state troopers to invite her up to a room he was using in the hotel. After Corbin went to the room, she asserted, Clinton said, “I love your curves,” exposed himself, and asked her to “kiss it.” She fled in horror. (For his part, Clinton always said he had no memory of meeting the young woman and denied any misconduct.) Jones sued for sexual harassment, claiming that her superiors in the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, where she was a secretary, retaliated