This Oct. 11, 1991 file photo shows University of Oklahoma Law Professor Anita Hill testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington. HBO says that Scandal star Kerry Washington will play Hill in a film about the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas. (AP Photo)
Lots of people have compared the Republican questions for James Comey yesterday to the 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing, where Sen. Arlen Specter grilled Anita Hill mercilessly about her testimony.
Even with the awful bits, I think I was lucky to have watched both. I agree that the parallels are striking. “Why didn’t you confront your ultimate boss — an alpha-male who controls your fate and could threaten your dream job of all time — tell him that you were uncomfortable with what he was suggesting, and make him stop. You should have made him stop!”
Pretty much the same thing, then as now, so long as you add in “President of the United States, head of the Executive branch, leader of the free world, and Cheetos-faced narcissist.”
I still admire the GOP stage management in 1991. We knew the outlines of Anita Hill’s testimony. The Republicans scheduled her careful testimony during the middle of the working day. They scheduled Thomas Clarence’s angry rebuttal smack in prime time, which they’d never done before. Worked like a charm. Almost nobody saw Hill’s testimony except in carefully trimmed excerpts. At the end, the GOP position was that Anita Hill was wrong and untrustworthy because she didn’t fight back hard enough at the time.
And so we have Supreme Court Justice Thomas.
Sounds like that assumption is still pretty much the official Republican response. I’d hoped we’d learned better in the decades since then, but, you know…
Republicans.
