Trump won't be the first litigious president

In Clinton v. Jones, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the notion that lawsuits against the president should be put off during his term, reasoning that "History indicates that the likelihood that a significant number of cases will be filed is remote." Not anymore. Donald Trump is currently a party to 75 different lawsuits, and has threatened to sue the dozen women who accused him of serial ass-grabbing during the campaign. He also wants to appoint a special prosecutor to throw his election opponent in jail, just like they do in Pakistan and Argentina. His lawyers, who apparently failed to ever entertain the notion he might win, have now requested a continuance of the Trump University trial on grounds that a president-elect has more important things to do than the actual president.

Press accounts indicate that Trump's litigiousness is unique and unprecedented. Not so. In fact, presidents have been filing and answering complaints for two centuries. When he was 18, Abraham Lincoln got arrested, defended himself, and won. The judge suggested he might have a future in trial work.

Trump's distaste for judges he doesn't like is also not without precedent. When he was preparing the defense of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson was criticized in a French-language newspaper by Louis Lavaller and promptly had him arrested. When federal judge Dominick Hall issued writ of habeas corpus freeing Lavaller, Jackson responded by throwing the judge in jail, too. When the battle was over and the judge restored to his perch, he fined Jackson $1,000. Fourteen years later, President Jackson arranged to have himself reimbursed. When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Cherokee land claim in Worcester v. Georgia, Jackson, who had once been a judge himself, sneered "Justice Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it."

Astonishing as it may seem, Theodore Roosevelt arranged for the U.S. Attorney in New York to indict Joseph Pulitzer for publishing a story critical of Roosevelt's Panama policy.

Pulitzer got his start publishing German-language newspapers in St. Louis and eventually bought the St. Louis Dispatch in a bankruptcy sale conducted on the steps of the same courthouse where the Dred Scott case was tried. When Pulitzer moved to New York and bought the New York World, he sponsored a baseball championship called The World Series, invented the cross-word puzzle, and printed scandalous news on yellow paper, inspiring the term "yellow journalism." He left money in his will for prizes you may have heard about.

The World had reported that a consortium of American businessmen, including Clark Taft, brother of Roosevelt's hand-picked successor William, paid $12 million less for the canal than the government had appropriated and steered the funds to capitalize their own canal company. Roosevelt wrote to federal prosecutor Henry Stimson: "I do not know anything about the law of criminal libel, but I should dearly like to have it invoked about Pulitzer."

Stimson found an 1825 law "To Protect Harbor Defenses" that permitted the government to imprison someone who violated a state criminal law on federal property. The World was sold at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The state law against libeling the president had been repealed decades earlier, but Stimson argued that the federal statute grandfathered it. The World editorialized, "Mr. Roosevelt is mistaken. He cannot muzzle the World." Judge Charles Hough, a Roosevelt appointee, agreed, and Stimson, on Roosevelt's orders, took the case all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the First Amendment trumps presidential ego.

In their biographies of Roosevelt, David McCullough, Edmund Morris and Doris Kearns, all ignore the story. After he left the White House, Roosevelt grabbed headlines, first as a plaintiff, then as a defendant, in two spectacular libel cases, spending a fortune to secure a settlement of six cents. Henry Stimson later served as secretary of war and secretary of state under three different presidents.

President John F. Kennedy got sued in 1961 by a young ambulance-chaser named Marvin Mitchelson, who later went on to money, fame and then infamy as a high-profile Hollywood divorce lawyer. He famously sued Lee Marvin for dumping his live-in girlfriend, Michelle Triola. That "palimony" suit wasn't Mitchelson's first novel argument. Mitchelson represented a Mississippi state senator named Hugh Bailey, who had cultivated a public image as "The Donkey-Riding Senator." At the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 1960, Kennedy loaned Bailey and two other delegates his car to attend a party thrown by Pearl Mesta. They got in a wreck and Mitchelson argued that since Kennedy loaned them the car to get their votes, they weren't really "guests" under what was then California's guest statute. Moreover, since Bailey's injuries meant he could no longer ride a donkey, his political brand was ruined. He sued the president for $250,000. Kennedy hired a local accident defense lawyer who claimed that the trial should be delayed because as Commander-in-Chief Kennedy was protected under The Soldiers and Sailors Relief Act. Judge Emil Gumport ruled "Nice try but no cigar," and Kennedy gave Bailey and Mitchelson $17,500 to go away.

Clinton's lawyers reprised that argument in the Paula Jones case, but abandoned it because of the guffaws it provoked. When the high court ruled against Clinton, he sat for a deposition where he lied in response to an irrelevant question in an unfounded lawsuit. It got him impeached. Paula Jones settled on appeal, collecting just enough to pay her lawyers and get a nose job.

Our current president-elect now has his hands full appointing a cabinet, figuring out what Nuclear Triad means, and finding Syria on a map. The fate of the nation is threatened by all the distractions that come with the president defending lawsuits and filing his own for fun, profit and spite. Maybe it's time for Mr. Trump to take up a new cause: tort reform.