Let’s Have the Senate Hearing

Leon E. Panetta is absolutely right. “This isn’t a vote about White House process, this is a vote about the qualifications of this surgeon general,” the White House chief of staff said Sunday. Panetta was responding to charges that the Clinton Administration did not adequately check the background of Dr. Henry W. Foster Jr.

Indeed, the White House did not accredit itself by the sloppy staff work it did before President Clinton nominated Foster. Staffers should have known the controversial details of Foster’s long and distinguished career as a physician and educator. Perhaps, knowing the politics of abortion, the White House staff should have been aware that Foster had performed not “fewer than a dozen,” as he first claimed, but more like 39, as he stated last week.

But that’s not at all the point here. Republicans, particularly those farthest to the right, have turned sloppy staff work into an opportunity to try to humiliate this worthy nominee and the Administration by forcing the President to withdraw his name before the Senate even holds hearings.

Clinton has promised to fight for his nominee; he must do that and more. He should use Foster’s nomination to call the Republicans’ bluff, to insist on Senate hearings that could put the most conservative among them on record--once again--as being opposed to legal abortions, to accessible reproductive health care, including the full range of contraceptive services and, importantly, to a man who has devoted his 38-year career to serving teen-agers and young adults.

At their peril will Republicans pursue their current strategy of portraying Foster as a man at odds with mainstream family values and of pressuring Clinton to abandon him. Most Americans believe in a woman’s right to choose an abortion--still the law of the land--and most understand that reducing the number of teen-age pregnancies and the incidence of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases is far more complicated than urging teen-agers to “just say no.” At their 1992 national convention, Republicans forgot that and ostracized those, including many long-time party faithful, who believed otherwise. They risk doing that again.

Foster’s confirmation hearings should become the occasion for a sorely needed public discussion of these and other pressing public health questions facing this nation.