BUT DID SHE INHALE?

While all of Washington, D.C., is absorbed, or so it seems, in esoteric questions about arcane legal concepts like "perjury" and "subornation of perjury"--whatever they mean--the political world is missing the real issue: If some of the seedier snippets leaked from the Tripp-Lewinsky tapes are to be believed, then lying in a deposition is but one of the President's offenses.

That is, if Bill Clinton happened to have maybe-somehow-possibly-by-accident engaged in oral sex with Monica Lewinsky during one of her 37 audiences with him (by The New York Times' count), the President is already guilty of a felony.

According to Richard Posner and Katherine Silbaugh's "A Guide to Americas Sex Laws" (University of Chicago Press, 1996)--housed on the P3 level of Pusey Library, where all the really good books are--fellatio is illegal in the nation's capitol. Very illegal. Silbaugh and Posner read D.C. Code Annual 22-3502 (enacted 1948) as designating it a felony to "take the sexual organ of another person in ones mouth...or to place ones sexual organ in the mouth...of another."

What's more, under another statute Clinton would be guilty of misdemeanor adultery, although Lewinsky would not. D.C. Code Annual 16-904(b)(3) (enacted 1963), Posner and Silbaugh explain, stipulates that "when [adultery] is between a married woman and an unmarried man, both parties are guilty." On the other hand, when it occurs "between a married man and an unmarried woman, only the man is deemed guilty." Tough luck for the big guy.

Of course, as we all know, sodomy and adultery laws are rarely enforced. But then again, a federal investigator wiring a government worker and sending her to get details about the personal life of an elected official isn't something that happens every day, either. Is it?