Tag: Congress

Celebrate Women’s History Month with Hillary Clinton

Adele Fasick4 Comments

As we celebrate Women’s History Month, we should note that more women are serving in Congress now than have ever served before. And a majority of the candidates for the 2020 presidential election are women. This week one of the people most responsible for this revolutionary change is leaving the active political scene. Hilary Clinton has announced that she will not be a candidate for president in 2020. It’s about time we recognized all that she has done to make the changes in our political life possible.

Women in Congress

There have been other women candidates for President over the years. The notorious Victoria Woodhull ran for president as long ago as 1872, but no other woman has opened the door for a female president as wide as Hillary Clinton has. She has been opening doors for women now for more than a generation.

How many of us remember when Clinton became first lady in 1993? She took over the role of the previous First Lady, Barbara Bush, and the contrast was sharp. Barbara Bush followed the typical path of women who grew up in the early twentieth century. She dropped out of Smith College to marry George H.W. Bush and to follow her husband around the country while he served in the military and went on to his career. When she became First Lady in 1989, she promised that she would be a “traditional” First Lady.

Hillary Clinton followed a different path. She completed her college degree at Wellesley College and went on to Yale law school. Like Barbara Bush, she met her future husband while she was a student, but she chose not to interrupt her education. She and Bill Clinton moved to Arkansas, but after they married, she continued to use her maiden name. Her decision to keep that name was unusual at the time and apparently caused some dispute with both her mother and her mother-in-law, but Hillary was already forging a path that would be followed by many other women in years to come.

Hillary Clinton

The public career of Hillary Clinton is too well-known to need retelling. She served as First Lady in her husband’s administration and later as Senator from New York. She became Secretary of State in the Obama administration and travelled to more countries than any Secretary of State had done previously. During all of her assignments, her life was made more difficult because she was a woman. Often the comments were just plain silly. These ranged from complaints about her remark as First Lady that she didn’t stay home and bake cookies, to criticism of the pants suits she often wore. She was a true pioneer and the choices she made no doubt seemed threatening to some conservatives at the time, but no one today would give them a second thought. 

During the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton got more votes than the man who became president, but because of our complicated Electoral College system, those votes were not enough to win the office. We will never know how much the 2016 race was influenced by the reluctance of many men, and some women, to vote for a woman for president.

Hillary Clinton’s long service to her country in many capacities has paved the way for the more equitable Congress that we now have and for the number of women who are willing to run for office. Surely we all owe her a vote of thanks for that. 

We owe her more than a vote of thanks. The next government building that is built in Washington D.C. should be named for Hillary Clinton. She deserves the tribute for changing the role of women in our government and ushering in a new era of gender equality in politics. Let’s put this on the agenda. What a wonderful way to celebrate Women’s History Month!

Speaking Truth to Power

Adele Fasick4 Comments

Last Monday we celebrated Labor Day, but the day did not offer much reason for working people to celebrate. The president struck a blow at the spirit of the day by cancelling scheduled salary increases for federal workers, citing a need to save money. It seems that the tax breaks for executives and corporations have to be paid for by workers lower in the hierarchy.

Still, there are bright spots on the horizon. This week we have also had a chance to see a

Ruth_Bader_Ginsberg1
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

number of women who are working hard to protect all Americans. Even though women were the last major group of citizens to be given the right to vote in the United States, they have finally come into their own as powerful voices for all of us.

The week started with the presentation of the documentary film, The Notorious RBG, a tribute to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has devoted much of her career to persuading her fellow judges of the importance of women’s rights. When Justice Ginsburg completed law school and looked for positions, she found that women were consistently discriminated against in employment. She was turned down for a clerkship on the Supreme Court because, she was told, women just were not appointed to such positions. When she was hired to teach at Rutgers law school, she was frankly told that she would be paid less than a man would be because women  did not have families to support.

Over the years, Justice Ginsburg has worked patiently, supporting small changes such as using “gender” instead of “sex” when talking about discrimination. It’s a small change, but it has moved discussion away from the emotion-laden word “sex” to a more neutral term.

Gradually Justice Ginsburg and others have gained acceptance for the idea that women and men should be paid equally for equal work and hired for their skills rather than

Dianne Feinstein
Senator Dianne Feinstein

their gender. And women must be allowed to speak out on issues of importance.  Having a voice and speaking out is an important part of being a citizen.

If you ever want a quick refresher in the history of how women have been silenced over the years, you should read Mary Beard’s short book called Women; a Manifesto.  Beard, a well- known classical scholar, tells how women’s voices have been silenced over the centuries. Perhaps it started with Telemachus, the

Kamela Harris
Senator Kamela Harris

young son of Odysseus, when he rebukes his mother for expressing an opinion: “go back up into your quarters” he said. “Speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.”

But women are no longer willing to be silenced. It has taken hundreds of years to develop their voices, but at last we are seeing it happen. More women are running for elective positions in 2018 than have ever run before. And this week we were able to see some of the results.

At the Senate Judicial Committee hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, some of the most memorable questions came from Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamela Harris. Whatever the outcome of the appointment may be, thousands of people across the country have had the satisfaction of seeing troublesome questions raised—questions about a woman’s right to choose, about limitations on presidential powers, and about the future of health care in America. Women spoke and attention was paid.

Now it is up to all of us to keep on speaking up—with our votes, with our actions, and with our voices. Democracy is not a spectator sport.

 

 

 

A Gloomy Fourth of July

Adele Fasick10 Comments

Those of us who are old enough may remember a little verse by Sarah Cleghorn that we heard in school:immigrant child

The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.

 

That verse popped into my mind yesterday as I heard the news about Congressmen (and women) leaving Washington this weekend to go back to their districts for the Fourth of July celebrations. Some of them are no doubt headed for golf courses. And meanwhile we have thousands of immigrant children being held in detention centers, separated from their parents, wondering what will happen to them. While our representatives celebrate the past glories of our country, they have not taken the time or made the effort to fix the immigration system so horrors like this do not occur.

This has been a bad year for America. Congress neglects its duties and focuses instead on satisfying donors and carrying out the demands of an erratic president. This month has shown how far America has wandered from the virtues celebrated in its usual July 4th self-congratulations.

Land of the Free? Well, not entirely. The Supreme Court upheld the right of individuals to use their religious beliefs to deprive some people of their right to buy a cake in a public shop. But now that Justice Kennedy has announced his retirement, Trump and his supporters are determined to appoint a new justice who will take away the right of women to practice their own beliefs in choosing the medical treatment that is right for them and their families. A justice who will support laws imposing the religious beliefs of some Americans about when human life begins to prevent all women from following their own consciences. Depriving other people of their right to privacy and their right to access appropriate treatment is not freedom.

Home of the Brave? It is difficult to see much bravery in Congress these days as they meekly accept the orders of an ignorant and bullying president. Paul Ryan, who spoke out bravely during the 2016 election campaign and refused to support a man whose morals showed him to be blatantly unfit for office, has crumbled along with the rest of the Republican majority. Congress stood by and watched the farce of accepting an order that immigrants from a number of Muslim-majority countries should be barred from the U.S. No one will be more secure because of this limitation, but many families will suffer. They passed a tax bill that reduced taxes for their supporters and probably themselves, but will leave ordinary working people behind. They accepted the imposition of a record-breaking national debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay. And they failed to ensure that all Americans get a decent level of healthcare

No, this is not a Fourth of July to celebrate. Instead of mouthing worn-out phrases about America’s past glories, this is a year to start reversing, as much as we can, the slide backward into the bad old days we worked so hard to overcome. Instead we can

  • Get in touch with our representatives and urge them to fix our immigration policies and live up to our ideals.
  • Choose candidates in the upcoming midterm election who will battle to ensure that the gains that have been made over the past century in Civil Rights and Women’s Rights are not thrown away.
  • Urge our leaders to work with our allies and democracies around the world to maintain peace and stability in the world. We do not need to cater to autocrats and sully our reputation as an example to the world.
  • And the only way to do all of this is to REGISTER AND VOTE! voting