From: riggs@descartes.tec.army.mil (Bill Riggs)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,misc.legal
Subject: Re: NO! President Bill, 72% of Americans are NOT lawyers!
Date: 26 Jan 93 02:23:02 GMT
Followup-To: talk.politics.misc,misc.legal
Distribution: usa
Organization: LNK Corporation, Riverdale, MD

In article <1jqlh7INNe9r@shelley.u.washington.edu> tzs@stein.u.washington.edu (Tim Smith) writes:
>riggs@descartes.tec.army.mil (Bill Riggs) writes:
>>	2. Did Ted know that the attorney general nominee appoointment was
>>	withdrawn before he posted ? It strikes me that this appointment
>>	has been gored specifically because of the political strife over
>>	appointing a woman to this position. Better it would have been to allow
>>	Bill to appoint Hillary to the job than to hawk the attorney 
>>	generalship among judges who don't want it, ideologues who want it,
>>	but don't support Bill Clinton's moderate agenda, and the late Zoe
>>	Baird, who suffered the fate of many "hurry up" Republican candidates -
>>	and got through the screening process, only to end up embarrassing
>>	the new administration. Clinton did the right thing by acting quickly
>>	and aggressively to terminate the candidacy.
>
>She got gored for violating immigration law, not for being a woman.

	Err...maybe I didn't make myself clear. My argument was that Zoe
Baird's nomination got rushed because (as Ted Frank pointed out to me
in a message) Patricia Wall was Clinton's first choice, but declined, from
what I understand because she needs to pull more time as a federal judge
to lock in her pension. There was a NOW-approved candidate, whose name
eludes me, a candidate who was excessively liberal for Clinton's standards.
Having promised to get a women in at Justice, and having blasted the feminists
for acting as "bean counters", Bill Clinton turned to Zoe Baird, who looks
and talks like a pretty darn perfect neo-liberal yuppie.

	As the dust settles, it appears that the Clinton Transition Team 
could not seem to find the time to locate a less risky candidate, and someone
up the line made a decision to go in spite of the facts (I'm NOT accusing
Clinton himself, he appears not to have known the entire story, and the manner
in which he was confronted with the issue seems to have been heavily filtered
with respect to some of the more embarrassing details...Mr. Clinton appears
to have trusted the advice he was given, and not to hae probed further into
the matter.

	But the last few days have seen some interesting details come to light.

	1. There was apparently a low-level organized opposition to Baird on
	the part of consumer advocates. Baird's apparent advocacy of tort
	reform didn't win her any roses with the legal community's lobbyists.
	Her positions were enough in tune with the Republicans' ideology
	that they appear to have kept the gloves off until the Democrats
	started asking why they were playing softball against a weak candidate.
	In the end Joe Biden and Paul Simon carried the water of the 
	oppositionists, Orrin Hatch defended the nominee. Sound familiar ?
	Change the sex and the party identification and one might have been 
	at a Reagan-Bush Supreme Court nominee's hearing.

	2. It does a appear that Zoe Baird and her husband have little 
	appreciation for the relative difficulty of their child care
	problem. For one thing, the amount of money that they were willing
	to pay their illegal domestic servants was ridiculously low ($24,000
	per year) for the area that they lived in (Connecticut). It is
	patently clear that they were engaging in old-fashioned capitalist
	exploitation of the labor of "people of color", a practice that the
	New York Times now tells us is more frequent that those of us living
	in less priviledged goldfish bowls had been led to think. So much
	for a government that "resembles the American people", not to mention
	the now overquoted cliche about "working hard and playing by the 
	rules". If we now were to find that Zoe Baird is a driven workaholic
	who neglects her three year old son hoorribly, some of us might find
	something sympatico in her. Til then, her reputation might as well
	"down and out in Beverly Hills."

	3. I don't know what this all means, but the women's groups jumped ship
	on this nomination faster than did the Senators themselves - and ironic
	twist for Mr. Biden, who got in deep do-do with the sisters for having
	"botched" Anita Hill's allegations. It is clear that tokenism isn't 
	good enough for these people - they are, at bottom, committed to 
	nothing less and nothing else than total ideological victory. But it
	does kinda bother me when they don't have the decency to stand up and
	fight for a member of the constituency group they are supposed to be
	supporting. Too bad they can't blame the "cynicism and hypocrisy"
	on our dear belated ex-President George Bush now !

>
>(One might say she was gored for violating tax laws, too, but the tax laws
>in question are held in about as much respect by the general public as the
>laws against speeding, so I doubt they had much to do with it.)
>
>--Tim Smith

	Actually, as the crude saying goes - it hard to be a "little bit"
pregnant. Zoe Baird could hardly have gone to the IRS and said, "I'd really
like to pay some Social Security taxes on these undocumented aliens that
I have working for me." To her credit, she did fess up and pay all the fines
when the green card problem was resolved after about a year. Curiously,
the Peruvian couple split, after having resided in the Baird/Gerwitz 
household, and Baird apparently now pays the same bottom dollar to a US 
citizen to care for her child - that she paid the Peruvian woman - who departed
the Baird/Gerwitz some time after she got her green card and her husband left
her. According to press reports, the INS is now looking into the Peruvians'
case to see if deportation is in order. So much for plantation life, 
1990s-style.

Bill R.

--

"When up a dangerous faction starts,         "My opinions do not represent
With wrath and vengeance in their hearts;     those of my employer or
By solemn League and Cov'nant bound,          any government agency."
To ruin, slaughter, and confound;             - Bill Riggs (1992)
To turn religion to a fable,
And turn the Government to a Babel;
Pervert the law, disgrace the gown,
Corrupt the senate, rob the crown;
To sacrifice old England's glory,
And make her infamous in story.
When such a tempest shook the land,
How could unguarded virtue stand ?"
- Jonathan Swift (1732)