Slate "Joe Biden Still Doesn't Understand What He Did to Anita Hill"

[NRaleighLiberal]

He feels empathy for her pain, but her complaint is legal, not emotional.
By DAHLIA LITHWICK


https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/04/joe-biden-anita-hill-apology-problem-misunderstand-concern.html

Joe Biden is running for president. He has a lot to recommend him, including his ability to explain the problem with repackaging Nazis as benign Civil War enthusiasts. (At this point, I might support a kitchen mop in a jaunty fedora’s run for president as long as it was not actively repackaging Nazis as benign Civil War enthusiasts.) But we still have a good long while to figure out who should run for president, and if Biden thinks it should be him, we need to revisit his role in the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings. We need to revisit it not only because Biden badly bungled the hearing when it happened, but because he is badly bungling the baggage he carries over it now, in his first days on the campaign trail. His inability to correct for it is baffling given that he has lived through 2017 and 2018 along with the rest of us. But it’s particularly important to recognize that his failure here isn’t a problem of the 28 years that have passed in between—it’s a problem of truth and justice and law.

It would be very easy to dismiss Biden’s choices as just so much ancient history. It was 1991 when he presided over the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings over then–Judge Clarence Thomas’ conduct toward his subordinate, Anita Hill. Her testimony is what prompted us to build out the language we now use to talk about sexual harassment in the workplace, which is part of why, were Biden willing to evince any genuine contrition or responsibility for the errors made and the misconduct seemingly excused, it might be easy to forgive him. But we also have to reckon with the fact that, as Elise Viebeck has chronicled at length, Biden was hardly a confused bystander as the Thomas-Hill hearings unspooled. As committee chair, he controlled many of the processes and systems designed by the Judiciary Committee to ostensibly learn the truth behind Hill’s allegations. Biden was, quite simply, outplayed by Republican senators intent on smearing Hill as delusional and a nymphomaniac, as Jane Mayer reminds us. He allowed Republican senators to issue threats about how they would destroy her. He put in place a process that isolated her—he failed to call corroborating witnesses who had similar stories about Thomas and were prepared to testify before his committee. In the end, this meant that Hill was left alone in a his-word-against-hers contest that pitted her dignified answers against Clarence Thomas’ furious, unhinged anger.

Biden now says he understands all this. Does he, really? When I interviewed Hill in 2014, she reminded me of something she says frequently about those hearings: “I had a gender and he had a race,” by which she meant that “there were senators and the people in the country who ignored the fact that in Washington, D.C., particularly in 1991, there was a great deal of entitlement that went along with being a male.” And one of the privileges of being a male in D.C. in 1991, especially a male on the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, was that you got to make up the hearings process. And it wasn’t, as Viebeck notes, merely that Biden didn’t call witnesses or didn’t stop his colleagues from saying unconscionable things to Hill. He also made decisions about who testified when, the limited scope of their testimony, when the committee saw the FBI report, and how depositions were handled. It’s true this was happening on the fly, mistakes were made, miscalculations were not foreseen. But none of that means the final process was fair.


snip

last paragraph

I admire Joe Biden. I have a good deal of respect for a great deal of the work he has done over his long career. I feel sorry for his current suffering around the problem of Anita Hill. But I don’t need to talk about his feelings. I’d rather hear about how he thinks he screwed up, how he thinks Christine Blasey Ford was betrayed, and how systems he helped create still hamper the truth. I am glad he is sorry. I’d like to hear him talk about how it will never happen again.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Agreed with all of this. There are a lot of good, open-hearted men who simply cannot apologize for

things they feel they haven't done, no matter what effects people say their actions had. I can't figure out what would help. He loses absolutely nothing by offering a sincere apology.

[ancianita]

2. I saw the hearings, felt how wrong they were. But yes, I agree with you. Biden didn't "do" anything

to Anita Hill but by committee -- full of Republicans who also poisoned the well of the questioning climate toward Ms. Hill. I watched them, as well.

Nothing Hill said struck me as anything but believable. But the questions asked of her were unbelievable.

The Senate and Congress weren't full of feminists in those days.

[Skya Rhen]

4. Biden never personally attacked her - Hatch, Specter and Simpson did - how was he sickening?

I want exact quotes.

[Skittles]

5. did you read the article???

[Skya Rhen]

7. I watched the entire hearing. Did you? Never once did he verbally attack her.

I am still waiting for the quotes.

[Demit]

9. No one has accused him of verbally attacking her.

[Skya Rhen]

10. So how was it that Joe was supposedly "disrespectful, sickening, treated her horribly" all comments

that I hear constantly?

[Demit]

15. Whoever you are quoting, you can ask them, I suppose. But the gist of it for me is that

Biden was the chairman of the committee. He controlled the process; he set the rules. He didn't allow anyone to sit with Anita Hill for her to confer with. He didn't allow any of the other women to testify, women who could have corroborated her statements with their own; he didn't fully investigate. He allowed Clarence Thomas to testify both before and after Hill spoke. It was as if Hill was on trial.

Jane Mayer, who wrote a book about the hearings, says in a recent New Yorker article, "As Biden presided, the hearings devolved into a shocking showdown in which Thomas and his defenders did all they could to degrade Hill’s character and destroy her credibility, accusing her, with no real evidence, of being a liar, a fantasist, and an erotomaniac." That was indeed sickening.

(Mayer's article is a good read. It gives a full accounting of the process, for anyone who has forgotten all the details. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-joe-biden-hasnt-owned-up-to-about-anita-hill)


The tone of all of Biden's apologies is that he wishes he could have done more. Well, he could have. That's the responsibility he does not—can't seem to bring himself to—acknowledge. That's why this continues to be an issue.

[Skya Rhen]

17. Thanks - you prove my point - Biden did not verbally attack her

As you stated:

“Thomas and his defenders did all they could to degrade Hill’s character and destroy her credibility, accusing her, with no real evidence, of being a liar, a fantasist, and an erotomaniac." That was indeed sickening.”

So, as I said, there is no disrespectful quote that can be attributed to Biden. Others were nasty toward her - not Biden. Not his character.

[Demit]

18. JFC.

Nobody said he did. It wasn't his words, it was his actions. Your point is a straw man.

[Skya Rhen]

19. Joe set himself apart from the other Republicans - they were disrespectful and he was not.

He cannot be made to take responsibility for those grown a## men's actions. They treated her horribly - not him...

[crazytown]

6. Biden was the Chairman, not the prosecutor.

With hindsight there are things he could have done differently, but there always are. He was outmanoeuvred by the GOP. The behaviour of the Republican Senators was disgraceful. They broke assurances they gave to Biden in private. If Professor Hill wants to pin the blame on Joe, she is entitled to do so, but as a matter of procedure and logic, she is wrong

[Skya Rhen]

8. Exactly. The Repubs do the same outmaneuvering even today but we don't hold them accountable.

I guess they are feared and it's easier to pick on the congenial democrats.

[emmaverybo]

11. Agree absolutely. Also disgraceful was Thomas

He was never held to account for his abusive behavior to Hill. He has never been called out for misappropriating the worst horrors of racism to a soft-ball hearing in which conservatives cynically humiliated and persecuted Hill while using Thomas’s race to deflect a stronger challenge from the committee Dems.
Thomas and Grassley are still around if any of the key figures in that political circus would care to insist they apologize for sacrificing Hill for partisan ideology.

[ucrdem]

13. Exactly.

This is looking like Hillary's email and is getting old.

[honest.abe]

16. Agreed.

Joe could have done more but it was clearly a complicated situation. So easy for others to criticize after the fact.

Not to mention the public was heavily in favor of confirming Thomas, including Democrats.

[ucrdem]

12. Sorry but this is nonsense. Biden voted TWICE against Thomas: once in committee,

then after the hearings. He re-opened the already-lengthy hearings to allow Hill to testify. She did, for eight hours, with great dignity and conviction. He put the corroborating testimony in the transcript. Biden did everything he had to do and did it right. This article is basically a 'but-her-emails' song and dance and very lame.

p.s. JMHO! YMMV!

[oasis]

14. Lincoln, FDR and Churchill had volumes written about them. Mostly good.

So let it be with Biden.