A New Senate Judges Itself in Old Debate

Two years ago, Patty Murray was one of millions of Americans riveted to her television set as the Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, despite Prof. Anita Faye Hill’s claims that he had sexually harassed her.

She was outraged. “Why don’t they get it?” she recalls thinking.

On Monday, the Senate again debated sexual harassment. This time, Murray had a different vantage point--from the third row of antique desks in the Senate chamber.

And she got just as mad.

“Even here today, I am shocked and surprised that (the debate) appears to portray the senator from Oregon as the victim. I remind my colleagues more than two dozen women have brought their allegations to this body. Clearly, they see themselves as the victims,” said the freshman Democrat from Washington state.

Hers was one of the day’s few bursts of plain talk. Otherwise, what passed for debate was seven hours of mind-numbing legalese about whether the privacy rights of Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) should prevail over the Ethics Committee’s demands for his diaries.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), scribbling the details of her fellow senators’ arguments furiously into a fat spiral notebook, said that she too was frustrated by what she saw as the debate’s “micro-legal context.”

“What the Senate doesn’t get is the enormous frustration on the issue of sexual harassment,” she said in an interview. “It is not taken seriously.”

Yet much in the Senate has changed, even if it has not come quickly enough to suit the new women members.

Among those presiding over Monday’s session, for instance, were Feinstein and fellow California Democrat Barbara Boxer--both elected in a year when Hill was an emblem for women candidates. And one of the most vigorous advocates for seeking a subpoena was another of the Senate’s seven women members, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), new this year on the Senate Select Committee on Ethics.

By comparison, there were only two women in the entire Senate when it considered Thomas’ nomination and none on the Judiciary Committee. Judiciary now includes two women: Feinstein and Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.).

“As women watch now, they see women speaking,” said political consultant Ann F. Lewis, herself a former congressional staff member. “This is a Senate that has come to terms with a whole new set of issues. Issues that were the subject of cloakroom jokes 10 years ago now are the subject of debate on the Senate floor.”

For all the efforts to couch their arguments in delicate legalisms, the senators were keenly aware that the real issue under discussion was the Senate itself. For as much as anything else, the sexual harassment investigation against Packwood has become an excruciating self-examination for his 99 colleagues as well.

“A lot of people--in the media, in the public--think that we can’t handle the job of disciplining our fellow members and guarding the integrity of this institution,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), vice chairman of the Ethics Committee.

The Ethics Committee, with all new members taking on one of the Senate’s least desirable assignments, is under particular pressure to repair its reputation and that of the Senate as a whole.

“A lot of people criticized the committee for appearing to whitewash some offenses, for dragging its feet, for being partisan and fractious,” McConnell said.

When McConnell agreed to serve on the panel nine months ago, he said, “most of my colleagues told me I ought to have my head examined. They said that serving on the Ethics Committee was like bungee-jumping off a short cliff--the thrill is over quickly.”

Many Americans thought the panel had been too easy on the so-called Keating Five, a group of senators whose cozy relations with thrift executive Charles H. Keating Jr. came to symbolize the federal government’s failures during the savings and loan industry collapse.

Similarly, it was widely criticized last year for its decision not to investigate allegations that then-Sen. Brock Adams (D-Wash.) had made improper sexual advances toward eight women.

“The sole purpose of the Ethics Committee is to protect the reputation of the United States Senate,” said Sen. Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), another member of the panel. “Will the United States Senate stand behind the integrity of its ethics process?”

Which is why it appears certain that the Ethics Committee will win handily, when the Senate votes today.

For there is one facet of the Senate culture that has not changed, said Rutgers University political scientist Ross K. Baker. “When the institution is threatened, they will always choose the institution over the individual.”