Pulitzer Prize Winning Senators

by digby

Everybody’s talking about the fact that Jon “Box Turtle” Kyl and Huckleberry Graham wrote a little play and tried to insert it into the congressional record as a transcript in the Hamdan case. I mentioned this in passing last week in my post about Bush’s “unusual” interpretation of the decision (which when you consider his interpretive signing statements, may be less of a joke than that I originally made it.)

Christy at FDL writes:

Knowingly filing false information with a court is grounds for disbarment in my state, and I would be very surprised if Arizona and South Carolina didn’t have the same standards — this sort of behavior skews the entire legal process and it cannot be tolerated. Period.

I cannot emphasize enough how much this is NOT done as an attorney, and how it clouds every single thing you ever do from that point forward. No judge, anywhere, is going to believe anything either man ever does or files after this without triple checking it. And when you don’t have your integrity and your honesty as an attorney, you are useless to your clients over the long run.

Actually that’s already happened. At the end of this informative John Dean article, he writes:

Out of an apparent concern for interbranch comity, the High Court has chosen to ignore the bogus brief filed by Senators Graham and Kyl, rather than reprimanding the Senators. Nevertheless, when Graham and Kyl sought to file the very same brief, a month later, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columba, Slate’s Emily Bazelon reports that court “issued an unusual order rejecting” their amicus brief alone, although they accepted five others.

No one familiar with this remarkable behavior by Graham and Kyl can doubt why the court did not want to hear from these senators.

Does anyone remember the entire alumni association of the Barbizon school of blond former prosecutors hissing and shrieking in unison over the threat to the legal system posed by Monica Lewinsky filing a false deposition in the dismissed Paula Jones case? I do. You see, it was an assault on the rule of law to file false documents in a court proceeding. Nothing was more of a slap in the face to our constitution and our American system of justice than to try to defraud the court.

Now Huck and the Turtle were only dealing with a case of the most serious magnitude imaginable, a direct constitutional question of the separation of pwoers that was headed all the way to the Supreme Court to decide. There were, to my knowledge, no blow jobs involved. (There have been allegations of sexual humiliation and torture. But only the good kind.) And Huck and the Turtle are, after all, Republicans, which means that when they defraud the court it is for the country’s own good.

Still, I will never get over the rank hypocrisy of Huckelberry Graham, the unctuous House Manager, who droned on day after day in the impeachment hearings pretending to care deeply about the rule ‘o law. One hopes that Christy is right and that any time the government tries to cite a Huckleberry colloquy going forward that the opposing counsel brings this up and requests that it be checked for veracity. Huck and his partner The Box Turtle have shown they have a remarkable talent for writing fictional dialog.

Update: I was remiss in not mentioning that this issue was discussed a couple of months ago on other blogs such as Slate and Unclaimed Territory. I was aware of it and I just assumed that everyone else was as well.

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