The Washington Post - USA (2020-08-03)

A8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, AUGUST 3 , 2020

election 2020

BY MICHAEL KRANISH AND MATT VISER

Three decades ago, in one of
most criticized moments of his
career, Joe Biden oversaw the
all-male committee that heard
sexual harassment allegations
against Supreme Court nominee
Clarence Thomas.
Now, as Biden is days away
from making good on his promise
to pick a woman as his running
mate, he is also seeking to com-
plete an effort begun years ago to
make amends for his stewardship
of those hearings — which even
Biden has said were unfair to
accuser Anita Hill — and win the
support of women voters crucial
to his election.
Biden’s pending announce-
ment underscores how, during
his long Washington career, the
77-year-old former vice president
has sometimes haltingly respond-
ed to the seismic shift toward
women’s rights and protection
from sexual harassment. He ar-
rived in the Senate in the 1970s
when women had a limited abili-
ty to report misconduct and now,
he is seeking the presidency in
the midst of the #MeToo move-
ment.
In a personal reckoning over
the issue, he has apologized for
the way he has hugged and affec-
tion ately greeted women, ex-
plaining that his instinct comes
from an earlier era.
As Biden highlights what his
campaign website calls his “un-
matched record of working for
women,” an examination of his
actions during the early 1990s
shows how his views evolved as
he took a path that was some-
times tortuous.
In that period, Biden pushed
legislation to prevent violence
against women — an issue that
was not a party priority until he
focused on it. He assured abor-
tion rights activists that he would
not interfere with a woman’s deci-
sion, despite his long-standing
opposition to the procedure.
He elevated women to senior
roles on the staff of the Judiciary
Committee, which had held the
Thomas hearings, and recruited
two female senators to the com-
mittee.
Barbara Boxer, a California
Democrat who was elected to the
Senate in 1992, said in an inter-
view that Biden recognized
change was needed. “Anita Hill
focused the attention on the fact
that there were so few women in
the Senate and zero on the hear-
ing committee,” Boxer said.
Biden also took a strong stand
in early 1993 regarding his friend
and fellow senator Bob Pack-
wood, who faced multiple allega-
tions of making unwanted ad-
vances on staffers and other
women. Asked then if he would
vote to expel Packwood if the
allegations were proved, Biden
said, “Damned right I would.”
This evolution in Biden’s ap-
proach toward issues important
to women, born out of a dark
moment in his career, will soon
culminate in his selection of a
running mate, which could be
among the most significant fac-
tors in determining the fate of his
bid for the presidency.

All-male Senate

On the day Biden arrived in
Washington in 1973 as a U.S.
senator, he became part of an
institution in which every senator
was a man. He was 30 years old,
the sixth-youngest senator in his-
tory.
At the time, female staffers
were quietly advised to stay away
from certain members of Con-
gress. Some senators were known
for using private elevators to ac-
cost young female staffers. But
according to Biden’s former staff-
ers, he had a unique circum-
stance that on most nights took
him back home, and limited his
exposure to the worst of the Sen-
ate’s misogynistic culture.
Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and

their one-year-old daughter, Nao- mi, had been killed in an auto crash shortly after the election, and he returned nightly to Dela- ware to be with his surviving children, Beau and Hunter, making him one of the few senators not to spend nights in Washing- ton. He married his current wife, Jill, in 1977 and they had a daughter in 1981. Biden’s first bid for the presidency, in 1988, ended disastrously when he dropped out of the pri- maries after revelations that he plagiarized the speech of a British politician. Returning to Congress, he was looking for a new cause when an assailant in Montreal in 1989 killed 14 women at an engineer- ing school on suspicion they were feminists. That led Biden to a broader examination of violence against women, and he held hearings at which victims testified about their experiences. He introduced a bill in June 1990 that he called the Violence Against Women Act, which would enact federal penalties for vari- ous crimes against women. B ut the bill failed to gain traction as Republicans criticized it as federal overreach. (After it became law, the Supreme Court tossed out a key provision for just such a reason). At the time, women’s groups were more focused on abortion rights — an issue on which they held suspicions about Biden. The senator was personally opposed to abortion, and he often voted against measures to protect abortion rights or provide federal funding. In a letter to a constituent, Biden laid out his view: “Those of us who are opposed to abortion should not be compelled to pay for them. As you may know, I have consistently — on no fewer than 50 occasions — voted against federal funding of abortions.” Yet Biden also repeatedly stressed that he would vote against efforts to ban abortion, and in 1992 he co-sponsored the Freedom of Choice Act, which was designed to protect a woman’s right to an abortion. Biden’s effort to appeal to those on both sides of the issue failed to satisfy either group. He wrote in his 2007 autobiography, “Promis-

es to Keep,” that his position had “earned me the distrust of some women’s groups,” as well as “the outright enmity” of antiabortion groups that felt he didn’t go far enough in his opposition.

Backlash against Biden If women’s groups were skepti- cal of Biden, his oversight of the nationally televised Thomas hearings in October 1991 did not help him. Anita Hill testified that Thom- as had frequently sexually harassed her when she worked for him at the Department of Educa- tion and Equal Employment Op- portunity Commission. Biden, who failed to call witnesses who supported Hill’s testimony, told ABC News last year that “Hill did not get treated well. I take respon- sibility for that.” Biden voted against the nomination. At the time, there were two female senators. The backlash against Biden and his committee was so strong that female candi- dates announced campaigns across the country in what became known as the “Year of the Woman.” Biden responded with one of his most significant efforts to shore up support among women. As chairman of the all-male Judi- ciary Committee, he acknowledged that the panel needed female representation. Shortly after the 1992 election,

he traveled to Chicago to meet with one of the newly elected senators, Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African American female senator in U.S. history. As he ate a piece of cherry pie in her apart- ment, Biden beseeched Moseley- Braun to become a member of the Judiciary Committee. “You just want Anita Hill sit- ting on the other side of the table,” Moseley-Braun responded, meaning that Biden wanted a Black woman to sit alongside him instead of across from him at a witness table. Moseley-Braun said in an interview that she initially resisted but that Biden “just kept talking” and eventually persuaded her. Biden’s recruitment of Mose- ley-Braun (D-Ill.) and Sen. Di- anne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to the committee was both an implicit acknowledgment that he had failed to fully integrate women into his political life and a mile- stone he has cited ever since as part of his effort to appeal to female voters. Moseley-Braun said Biden’s recruitment of her and Feinstein to the Judiciary Committee “was a real dramatic change from the visual he got from the Anita Hill hearing. It was all old White men.

... It represented a great deal of
progress in a very visual way with
the public.”
As Biden took steps to improve
his image among women, a scan-

dal erupted. Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) had been questioned be- fore the election by Washington Post reporters about allegations that he had made uninvited sexual advances to women who worked for him. Packwood denied the allegations, which helped assure his reelection. But after the election, he told The Post: “I will not make an issue of any specific allegation,” and an article about the assertions reverberated for months. The Senate Ethics Com- mittee investigated. Rachel Gorlin, a Capitol Hill veteran who became campaign press secretary for Rep. Les Au- Coin, the Oregon Democrat who had tried to unseat Packwood in 1992, said that the revelations shook Congress. “I don’t think there was any woman or any man on Capitol Hill who was not aware of the fact that the issue of sexual harassment was public and it was no longer under wraps,” Gorlin said. The allegations shocked Biden, according to his former aides. In his early years in the Senate, Biden’s office was next to Pack- wood’s, and the two formed a productive bipartisan relation- ship. “ Joe and I were quite close friends in a day when you could work across the aisle,” Packwood later told the Oregonian newspa- per. Still, Biden’s aides said he was

oblivious to Packwood’s alleged transgressions. Biden declined to comment for this article. As the Packwood story domi- nated the news, a woman named Tara Reade, then 28, applied for and started working for Biden. Reade last year publicly said that Biden harassed her during the eight months she worked for him. This year she added the explosive allegation that one day in the spring of 1993, Biden pushed her against a Senate hall- way, put his hand under her dress and sexually assaulted her. Several people who were close to her during that time offered some corroboration of her account, although records of a com- plaint she said she filed with a congressional personnel office have not surfaced. Biden, who has strongly denied Reade’s allegation and said he has no memory of her, was known for being affectionate and gregari- ous. Some of those who worked for him at the time have said they witnessed the kinds of hugs and hand-holding that some women have s aid made them feel uncom- fortable. But Reade’s allegation shocked former Biden staffers, many of whom say that they have no memory of her or any allegation and that her account was radically different from the office culture at the time. Reade has testified in court as an expert on domestic violence. In May, some defense attorneys said they would seek to overturn convictions that relied upon testimony from Reade because she might have provided false infor- mation under oath, including overstating academic credentials.

Women in charge Biden continued his efforts to put women in key jobs and pass the Violence Against Women Act. Lisa Monaco, who worked as a low-level staffer on the Judiciary Committee from 1992 to 1994, said the office culture was domi- nated by women. Biden had ap- pointed women as his staff direc- tor, chief counsel and chief crime counsel. “Here was a group of women who were in charge. They ran the committee staff, they advised on the policy — and they had been empowered by Joe Biden,” she said. “It was very formative for me as a young woman seeing these women as my mentors.” With new attention on sexual harassment and more female leg- islators in office, efforts to protect women increased significantly. In 1994, Congress passed the Vio- lence Against Women Act, which Biden has called his proudest legislative accomplishment. In 1995, the Senate Ethics Commit- tee voted to expel Packwood, which led him to resign. Yet for Biden, some of the old ways took years to change. In 2014, he delivered a speech at the Democratic National Commit- tee’s Women’s Leadership Forum in which he lauded Packwood for working with him in bipartisan fashion, drawing complaints that he was praising a senator who resigned over mistreatment of female staffers. It was not until last year, under withering criticism from Demo- cratic groups for opposing federal funding for abortions, that Biden changed his position, saying he could no longer support the funding ban because it hurt millions of women who do not have health- care coverage. He also acknowledged that his habit of hugging women and put- ting his hands on their shoulders had caused discomfort. “It’s the way I’ve always been,” Biden said, vowing to be “much more mind- ful about respecting personal space in the future.” [email protected] [email protected]

Alice Crites, Beth Reinhard and Elise Viebeck contributed to this report.

A long quest for redemption

Biden has spent decades making amends for Anita Hill hearings, response to women’s rights

BARRY THUMMA/ASSOCIATED PRESS Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) stands while Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), at lectern, and other congresswomen discuss the Violence Against Women Act in 1993. Biden first introduced the bill in 1990 after 14 women were killed in Montreal.

MAUREEN KEATING/CQ ROLL CALL/ASSOCIATED PRESS Biden recruited Sens. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to the Judiciary Committee after the 1991 Anita Hill hearings had an all-male panel.

BY JOSEPH MARKS

The White House has no plans
to try to delay the Nov. 3 e lection,
Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said
Sunday, even as he defended a
tweet from President Trump that
raised the possibility.
“We’re going to hold an elec-
tion on Nov. 3, and the president
is going to win,” Meadows said on
CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
Trump’s tweet on Thursday,
which set off alarm bells through-
out Washington, was merely

meant to raise questions about whether a major expansion of mail-in voting during the novel coronavirus pandemic could pro- duce fraud or lead to untenable delays in counting votes, Mead- ows insisted. That tweet warned without evidence that “2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDU- LENT Election in history” and ended with “Delay the Election until people can properly, secure- ly and safely vote???” “There was a question mark,” Meadows said of the tweet. He also said that vastly expanded mail voting could delay election results by a month or more. “What we will do is if we try to transform this and start mail- ing in ballots all across the country, all 50 states, what we will see

is a delay because they’re just not equipped to handle it,” he said. Meadows’s defense comes after Republican lawmakers roundly rejected Trump’s suggestion to delay the election, including several of the president’s most stalwart allies such as Sen- ate Majority Leader Mitch McCo- nnell (Ky.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.). The president does not have the authority to change the date of the general election, which is set by Con- gress. “Never in the history of the country, through wars, depres- sions and the Civil War, have we ever not had a federally sched- uled election on time,” McCon- nell said last week. “We’ll find a way to do that again this Nov. 3.” Trump’s suggestion was also

rejected by Republican gover- nors, many of whom are trying to increase mail voting in their states. “It’s not helpful for the president to think out loud in a public fashion,” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. Arkansas is among the states that have expanded mail voting access to all voters during the pandemic. Actual instances of fraud in mail voting are exceptionally rare, and most Republican election officials are trying to expand mail voting despite the president’s comments. State election officials do warn that a surge in mail voting during the pandemic could cause delays in vote tallying. They have sought funding from Washington to help the process run more smoothly

but have reported only limited success. Congress appropriated $400 million for elections during the early weeks of the pandemic, but Democratic efforts to deliver up to $3.6 billion in additional funds have been stymied by Re- publicans. Democrats on Sunday attacked Trump’s tweet, calling it evidence that he wants to undermine confidence in the election and might refuse to leave office if defeated. “This guy never had an idea about wanting a peaceful trans- fer of power,” Rep. James E. Clyburn (S.C.), a member of the House leadership team, said on “State of the Union.” “I don’t think he plans to leave the White House. He doesn’t plan to have fair and unfettered elections. I believe that he plans to install

himself in some kind of emergen- cy way to continue to hold on to office.” Georgia politician Stacey Abrams, under consideration as a running mate for Joe Biden, said Trump “is doing his best to undermine our confidence in the process.” Rep. Karen Bass (Calif.), chair of the Congressional Black Cau- cus and another vice presidential contender, called Trump’s tweet an effort to distract from rising coronavirus infections and a cra- tering economy. “I think that he is a master at diversion, and I think that’s the main reason he did that,” Bass said on “Fox News Sunday,” refer- ring to Trump. “He knows he can’t delay the election.” [email protected]

White House steps back from Trump’s comment about delaying election

Meadows: Nov. 3 is still date; volume of m ail-in ballots may slow results

The Washington Post - USA (2020-08-03)

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