Led by a narrow conservative majority, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that school voucher programs are constitutional if they provide parents a choice among a range of religious and secular schools.

The 5-4 ruling further erodes the figurative wall separating church and state and clears a constitutional cloud from vouchers, an education idea dear to political conservatives and championed by President Bush.

Vouchers use taxpayer money to underwrite private or parochial school tuition. Opponents call them a fraud that will only siphon tax money from struggling public schools.

Now it appears there is real concern in Clinton circles about whether that deadline [Fall, 2003] will be met. Sources say Clinton has not only not written anything but has also not organized his thoughts in the fashion necessary to produce a serious book. While he has asked Ted Widmer, a Harvard-educated historian who served as a speechwriter on Clinton's national security staff, to assist him, at this point Clinton finds himself in the position of being ill prepared to turn in the multimillion-dollar project he has promised to produce within a year. It's a situation that doesn't surprise some who worked with Clinton through the years. "Lacking something [major] to do, he falls victim to entropy, which was always his biggest problem," says former political adviser Dick Morris. "Unless he had a goal [bigger than writing a book], he could never organize himself – and then entropy took over and he became sullen and disorganized and confused." In the end, Clinton may have to resort to bringing in a last-minute book doctor to assemble a book from interviews with the former president.