"Mueller is...likely to be grumpy when you question him. And who can blame him? You would be grumpy too if you were being subjected to hours of unwanted hectoring by your colleagues, many of whom are not very bright..."

"... will not have done their homework, and will want to yell at the man and ask him things that would be wildly inappropriate for him to answer. But you are that rare thing: a diligent member of Congress who wants to use your time with Mueller to bring out important findings and nuances of the Mueller report. What do you do?"

Writes Benjamin Wittes in "If I Had Five Minutes to Question Robert Mueller." From the advice:

[A]sk him questions to which you know the answer. This is not an investigative hearing. It is an exercise in political and legal theater, and you are trying to provide a compelling elucidation of Mueller’s work and findings. Ask only questions you know he can answer and whose answers you know will reasonably contribute to the thread you are developing.

Wittes has a series of yes-or-no questions that end with:

So, to summarize, I take your report to state that you found substantial evidence of presidential obstruction of justice, which you chose not to analyze, because you were deferring to Congress on questions of impeachment and to federal prosecutors after President Trump leaves office on questions of criminality. Is that a fair reading?

Why was Comey "just completely disgusted" when Trump pulled into the handshake and grabbed him around the shoulder?

"He thought it was an intentional attempt to compromise him in public."

Comey didn't want to shake hands at all...

[Brookings Institution fellow Benjamin Wittes, a close friend of Comey's] said Comey "really did not want to go to that meeting" and tried to distance himself from Trump to ensure the FBI's independence from the White House. Comey, who is 6 feet 8 inches tall, was wearing a dark blue suit and stood near the similarly colored curtains in the back of the room, hoping that Trump would not spot him.

Video at the link.

And that seems to have prompted Philippe Reines to tweet us some video of himself playing the role of Trump in Hillary Clinton's debate prep:

Not easy to avoid the unwanted Trump hug, sometimes it even takes practice...

A favorite moment from debate prep (9/24/16): pic.twitter.com/JAAHaqKFoa

— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) May 19, 2017

ADDED: I don't think trying to evade a handshake makes you look good. But what do you do when confronted with a person who has a handshake-plus move? There's the right hand doing the basic shake, and then the left hand gropes you on some other part of your anatomy — the upper arm or the shoulder? Do you just let him? If he's a star?

Obama's statement was "a gracious response from a man the court had just branded as the legal equivalent of a segregationist."

Benjamin Wittes wonders if the Obama campaign read the decision it said this about:

"Barack Obama has always believed that same-sex couples should enjoy equal rights under the law, and he will continue to fight for civil unions as president," the Obama campaign stated oh-so-carefully in response to this week's California Supreme Court decision striking down the state's ban on gay marriage. "He respects the decision of the California Supreme Court, and continues to believe that states should make their own decisions when it comes to the issue of marriage."

The state court likened the policy Obama promotes to "separate but equal" racial segregation:

"[Affording] access to [marriage] exclusively to opposite-sex couples, while providing same-sex couples access to only a novel alternative designation [domestic partnership], realistically must be viewed as constituting significantly unequal treatment to same-sex couples," the court wrote. Those challenging the law "persuasively invoke by analogy the decisions of the United States Supreme Court finding inadequate a state's creation of a separate law school for Black students rather than granting such students access to the University of Texas Law School."

Wittes, who supports gay marriage, criticizes the court for accepting the analogy offered by the litigants:

Somehow, we've confused progress on marriage equality with some of the most opprobrious episodes of our legal, cultural, and moral history. For having the guts to move forward while other states were passing nasty constitutional amendments depriving gays of any marital benefits, Californians stand condemned in their own courts for discrimination and in their own newspapers for bigotry.

Few people, of course, really believe this. When we listen to Obama touting civil unions, we hear the progress that he urges, not some appeal to segregation. But it can't be progress when Obama suggests civil unions, and also progress when a court strikes them down as unconstitutionally discriminatory.

It's very common to say that judges are "confused," but I don't see the confusion. The California Court continued (PDF) in the paragraph Wittes quotes:

As plaintiffs maintain, [the Texas Law School case demonstrates] that even when the state grants ostensibly equal benefits to a previously excluded class through the creation of a new institution, the intangible symbolic differences that remain often are constitutionally significant.

Obviously, the court knows that the state was trying to move toward equality here, and I don't hear it insulting the politicians who want to move only incrementally. It is saying that there is constitutional significance to the symbolism of creating a separate institution. It seems to me that the court was reasoning in a principled, doctrinal fashion and not leavening its decisionmaking with sensitivity toward political realities.

First, fire all the law clerks.

Stuart Taylor Jr. and Benjamin Wittes think the Supreme Court Justices have too much free time -- what's with O'Connor taking 28 junkets in '04 and publishing 3 books in 4 years? -- and it's making them arrogant. (Link for subscribers to The Atlantic... or use this link, which is good for 3 days.)

Eliminating the law clerks would ... make them more “independent” than they really want to be, by ending their debilitating reliance on twentysomething law-school graduates. Perhaps best of all, it would effectively shorten their tenure by forcing them to do their own work, making their jobs harder and inducing them to retire before power corrupts absolutely or decrepitude sets in.

No justice worth his or her salt should need a bunch of kids who have never (or barely) practiced law to draft opinions for him or her....

Justice Harry Blackmun’s papers show that, especially in his later years, clerks did most of the opinion writing and the justice often did little more than minor editing, as well as checking the accuracy of spelling and citations. Ginsburg, Thomas, and Anthony Kennedy reportedly have clerks write most or all of their first drafts—according to more or less detailed instructions—and often make few substantial changes. Some of O’Connor’s clerks have suggested that she rarely touched clerk drafts; others say she sometimes did substantial rewrites, depending on the opinion.

There’s no reason why seats on the highest court in the land, which will always offer their occupants great power and prestige, should also allow them to delegate the detailed writing to smart but unseasoned underlings. Any competent justice should be able to handle more than the current average of about nine majority opinions a year. And those who don’t want to work hard ought to resign in favor of people who do.

I heartily agree!