Speaking at The Biden Courage Awards on Tuesday night, former Vice President Joe Biden ironically referenced his own stunning lack of courage during the 1991 Anita Hill hearings.
Biden, an undeclared presidential nominee widely expected to run in 2020, said he wishes that he could have “done something” to help Ms. Hill get through the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings without being attacked and abused.
Of course, as the head of Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, Biden could have acted in any number of ways to ensure that Hill was treated fairly and professionally. If she wasn’t handled with respect, nobody shares the burden for this injustice more than Biden.
Ducking responsibility
Hill, an attorney and academic who worked with Thomas, accused the now-justice of sexual harassment while she worked for him at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Although the Judiciary Committee deadlocked 7-7 and failed to recommend him, Thomas was later confirmed by the full Senate.
“A brave lawyer, a really notable woman, Anita Hill, a professor, showed the courage of a lifetime talking about her experience being harassed by Clarence Thomas,” Biden said, addressing young activists who work to prevent sexual assault on college campuses. “But she paid a terrible price. She was abused in the hearing. She was taken advantage of. Her reputation was attacked. I wish I could have done something.”
He went on:
There were a bunch of white guys…hearing this testimony in the Senate Judiciary Committee. So when Anita Hill came to testify, she faced a committee that didn’t fully understand what the hell it was all about. And to this day I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to get her the kind of hearing she deserved given the courage she showed by reaching out to us.
Biden is clearly concerned with his legacy regarding Thomas’ confirmation hearings. When the former vice president learned that HBO was filming a historical reenactment of the hearings set to air in April 2016, he reportedly reached out to the network and convinced them to make adjustments to the script that would portray him in a better light.
The result, according to several Republicans who were part of the judiciary committee, had “nothing to do with historical accuracy” and was “instead meant to sway political opinion eight months before Americans vote for a new president.” For his part, Len Amato, president of HBO Films, didn’t deny that the film was edited to indulge Biden’s demands, admitting: “We measure their input against the research we’ve done, and against our sourcing, and if we think someone makes a point that’s valid, we make an adjustment.”
Throughout the film, Biden is depicted as suffering from a debilitating toothache that ludicrously prevents him from reigning in the Republican villains around him. When he finally stands up to defend Ms. Hill, he does so by scolding a Republican colleague in an empty restroom devoid of any witnesses who could possibly corroborate his brief moment of moral accountability.
Judge and jury
The truth is that nobody shares the credit for Hill’s treatment at the hands of a Democratic-majority committee than Biden, the chairman of the panel that questioned both Hill and Thomas. Yet, the former vice president likes to think of himself as a well-intentioned bystander who lacked the agency to stop the “white guys” around him from abusing their witness.
“He was basically playing judge,” Georgetown University law professor Susan Deller Ross, an expert in workplace sexual harassment cases, told the New York Times of Biden in 2008. “I’m sure you remember nobody played advocate for [Hill]. I don’t think he did well and he bears responsibility for Mr. Thomas being on the court… He did everything to make it be good for Thomas and to slant it against her.”
Biden has been criticized for the way he administered the hearings. He refused to allow other women who made similar allegations of sexual harassment to testify, and experts on workplace sexual misconduct were prohibited from submitting affidavits.
By bringing up Hill’s testimony before his critics, Biden is clearly hoping to preempt his critics and get in front of the issue before he throws his hat in the ring for the 2020 presidential race. The former senator and vice president will likely face questions from fellow Democrats about his conduct during the confirmation hearings, and it could turn into a hot-button issue during the Democratic primaries.
#MeToo moment
Biden’s lack of leadership has been reevaluated during the #MeToo era, and the gravity of his decisions has taken on greater significance as dozens of politicians are embroiled in sexual controversies. He took the opportunity to reflect on his regrets during another sex scandal in 2018.
“The one regret I have is I wish there had been a way I could’ve controlled the questions. But you can’t in a committee. Remember, when they went after the last victim [Hill], I kept trying to gavel, but there was no way to say, ‘You can’t ask that question,’” he told reporters during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
“I wish I had been able to do more for Anita Hill,” Biden told Teen Vogue in 2017. “I owe her an apology.”
However, to this day, that apology has never materialized. Hill says that Biden has never personally approached her about the hearings, although she admitted that the “statute of limitations has run on an apology.”
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