Photo: Paul Demko, MnIndy

Photo: Paul Demko, MnIndy

TPM’s Josh Marshall, sparked by a photo of Sen. Al Franken at Obama’s health care speech this week, digs up an anecdote from early in his career when he was covering President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. The year was 1999 and Marshall found himself, somehow, sitting beside Franken in a Senate press room in the Capitol. Franken attended the hearing as a guest of an unnamed senator, but when he found himself at a press briefing with Sen. Phil Gramm, he piped up as if he was there as a journalist — and was ultimately kicked out.

Marshall recalls what he calls “maybe the funniest impeachment moment”:

Sen. Phil Gramm had just bounded into the room to do a little damage control about Sen. Robert Byrd’s proposed motion to dismiss … Franken raised his hand and asked Gramm whether he would have voted for the articles of impeachment if he were in the House, knowing what he now knew. Gramm seemed to have no clue who Franken was and proceeded to ignore the question and pipe on about justice being a process, not a verdict.

Franken and I chuckled about Gramm’s refusal to answer the question, and suddenly two spindly arms reached across me and grabbed Franken and started to pull him out of his chair. It was a woman from the Senate press office, barking, “You have to leave. You’re not press.” Franken pointed to me and said, “But I’m with someone from the press” as he was being rushed out of the room. But he stayed in character through the whole thing, laughing as he got tossed out. That really drove the woman crazy. She mustered up her schoolmarm best and scolded him: “It’s not funny!”

I rushed out of the press room after Franken got the boot. But by the time I got out into the hall, he’d already slipped back into the Senate gallery — where celebrities, but not the press, are allowed to roam free.