Meet the Lawyer Who Defends Everything Retrograde

Did you know that House Republicans are paying a single lawyer as much as $1.5 million to defend America’s “Defense of Marriage” Act? Your tax dollars at work! (There is, at least, a rationale for that: it is a law of America, and laws exist to be defended. But then lawyers argued against the 13th and 19th Amendments, too.) The lawyer is Paul D. Clement, and he represents everything else that is terrible, like Arizona’s immigration law, and he also won the Florida case against the new requirement that all Americans have health insurance. (He’s also the dude who claimed, to the Supreme Court’s faces, that we didn’t torture people… right before the Abu Ghraib pictures came out.) But he’s not a political operator, he says: “Mr. Clement resists discussing his own politics, and said he eagerly took work from wherever it came.” Oh, I see.