A Democratic Cabinet With a Liberal Return Policy

Hillary Clinton is up against the same pay provision that threatened to sink Nixon AG nominee William Saxbe. (The Washington Post)
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Apparently that's not always the case. The banter between longtime friends Justice John Paul Stevens and U.S. District Judge Jose Gonzalez Jr. of Fort Lauderdale sounds like a lot more fun.

Stevens mostly played straight man to Gonzalez during their joint appearance Monday at an event sponsored by the University of Florida's Fredric G. Levin College of Law. Gonzalez joked that when he was in law school, he "wasn't sure I wanted to be a lawyer, but I was certain I wanted to have a good time," and as a result he needed an extra summer in order to graduate last in his class.

Now, here he is friends with a Supreme Court justice, and he said their conversations have three major ingredients: "Washington Redskins football, Florida Gators football, and judicial salaries and benefits."

For most judges, it would be salaries first.

Long-Distance

The phone bill is inching up at transition headquarters in Chicago. Obama returned phone calls to five world leaders yesterday, thanking them for their congratulatory calls on his election victory.

Aides said Obama spoke with Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, Nigerian President Umaru Yar' Adua, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, South African President Kgalema Motlanthe and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

With Philip Rucker and Alice Crites

Even if the problems involving Bill Clinton's finances can be resolved, there's another potential issue for his wife's nomination. It's called the Constitution of the United States, specifically Article I, Section 6, also known as the emoluments clause. ("Emoluments" means things like salaries.)

It says that no member of Congress, during the term for which he was elected, shall be named to any office "the emoluments whereof shall have been increased during his term." This applies, we're advised, whether the member actually voted on the raises or not.

During Clinton's current term in the Senate, which began in January 2007, Cabinet salaries were increased twice -- first that month and again in January 2008, to $191,300.

This situation has arisen before, most famously in what became known as the "Saxbe Fix," which involved a controversial, somewhat tortured reading of the Sacred Document. The "fix" came in 1973, when President Richard M. Nixon nominated Sen. William Saxbe (R-Ohio) to be attorney general after the famed "Saturday Night Massacre" of the Watergate scandal. Saxbe was in the Senate in 1969 when the AG's pay was raised.

Congress acceded to Nixon's request to lower the attorney general's salary to its pre-1969 level. Apparently this had been done once before, in 1909, for a senator in line to be secretary of state. And President George H.W. Bush, as he was leaving office, approved a Saxbe fix so that Sen. Lloyd Bentsen could become Treasury secretary.

But Democrats in the past have inveighed against this sleight of hand. In the Saxbe case, 10 senators, all Democrats, voted against the ploy on constitutional grounds. Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), the only one remaining, said at the time that the Constitution was explicit and "we should not delude the American people into thinking a way can be found around the constitutional obstacle."

Call it the Hillary Amendment?