Clinton Gets Break In Harassment Suit

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether all proceedings in a sexual harassment suit against President Clinton should be delayed until he leaves office.

The action had the practical effect of putting on hold the lawsuit by a former Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, until after the November election, removing the prospect that pretrial proceedings or a trial itself could turn into an embarrassing election-year sideshow.

A stay granted earlier this year by a federal appeals court will last until the justices dispose of the case, and a decision will not come until early 1997 at the earliest.

The case presents a novel issue for the Supreme Court, which has never addressed whether a sitting president can be sued for events before he became president. Clinton is appealing a ruling by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in St. Louis, which in January rejected his argument that the special burdens of office required a delay in all proceedings in the civil lawsuit, which seeks $700,000 in damages.

“The president, like all other government officials, is subject to the same laws that apply to all other members of our society,” the appeals court said in a 2-1 ruling.

Earlier, the Federal District Court in Little Rock had ruled that while the trial should be deferred, lawyers for Jones could begin interviewing witnesses, including Clinton, to preserve their testimony while memories were still fresh.

In her lawsuit, filed in 1994, Jones, a former secretary in the Arkansas Statehouse, said that in 1991, Clinton, then the state’s governor, had made crude sexual advances to her in a Little Rock hotel room. Clinton has denied the allegation and has said he does not remember meeting his accuser.

The president’s Supreme Court appeal, filed by his personal lawyers and supported in a brief filed by Solicitor General Drew Days III, described the question in the case as one of “extraordinary national importance.” Never before, the president’s petition said, has a court ordered “a sitting president to submit, as a defendant, to a civil damages action directed at him personally.”

Clinton is seeking not immunity from liability, but a delay in the proceedings, based on the burdens of office. “The president is never off duty, and any significant demand on his time necessarily imposes on his capacity to carry out his constitutional responsibilities,” the petition said.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that a president is absolutely immune from civil suits challenging his official acts as president. But that decision, Nixon vs. Fitzgerald, did not address whether a president can be required to defend himself in a lawsuit based on events before he took office. In the appeal on Monday, Clinton vs. Jones, No. 95-1853, the president’s lawyers argue that the two situations raise similar threats about the separation of powers.

Lawyers for Jones, urging the court to reject the case, argued that a suit concerning events before a president took office has “no possible relation to his official responsibilities.” Calling the case “at bottom, a very simple dispute about what happened in a very short encounter between two people in a room,” the brief argued that “no peril would be posed for the presidency by allowing this case to proceed.”