About 20 years ago, a buddy of mine talked me into going to a strip club. I don't like strip clubs. The hustle's too crude. Still, I am always a good friend so, even though I hadn't been to a strip club in a decade, I went. It was a "gentlemen's club," so they ran us through a metal detector at the door and they robbed me for a $5 "cover charge."

It turned out that my buddy, who wanted to go to the joint so bad, wasn't all that worldly. When the girls weren't dancing, they hung around the bar, hustling drinks.

"Maybe she'll come sit with us," my buddy said, pointing to the taller of two lingerie-clad girls at the bar.

"Yeah," I said. "Maybe you should call her mother and ask if it's OK for her to join us."

The guy was gonna need help.

I took a $20 bill out of my pocket, folded it once the long way, stuck it between the first two fingers of my left hand, raised that hand in the air and start to wave the bill slowly, maybe two inches to either side.

The shorter of the two girls un-leaned herself from the bar and started toward our table. I nodded my head in the universal gesture for "No. Not you," and pointed the bill at the other girl, who joined us soon enough.

It wasn't a nice thing to do, what I did, but it wasn't a nice place, and I wanted to get home sometime before dawn.

Strip clubs have to be legal, they tell us, because "dancing" is a protected form of free speech. This fools no one, including the drunk, loathsome regulars, not even the most hammered of whom confuses what he is seeing with, say, "The Federalist Papers."

But still, a law, or even a constitution, is like a wall with a hole in it the size of a quarter. You can't get through the hole, and I can't get through the hole, but a rat can get through the hole. That's how rats are made.

So, the Supreme Court, which is thought by conservatives to spend most of its time protecting transvestite, illegal alien, drug-dealing serial killers, spots the hole in the wall and it spots the rat.

But it doesn't patch the hole, which is a constitutionally protected hole.

And the rat gets through and he sits at a table and the senators and congressmen lounge at the bar in lingerie and the rat folds a million dollar bill once the long way and he waves it in the air, maybe two inches from side to side.

And a senator comes and sits on his lap.

The hustle stays crude. It doesn't get any smarter and it doesn't get any cuter because it doesn't have to get smarter or cuter. It works.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. A collection of Dion's Pulitzer Prize-nominated columns, "Between Wealth and Welfare: A Liberal Curmudgeon in America," is available from Amazon.com