Zoe Baird and American childcare - 19 February 1993

That roaring sound that you hear is not the storm system out of the west that's blasting most of this continent with Arctic blizzards and paralysing winds. It's the morning-after response of the Republicans, of many businessmen, many doctors and oil men, to the tax bill which President Clinton dumped on a rather startled Congress on Wednesday evening. The Republican uproar was predictable since President Clinton had fulfilled their nastiest warnings.

All through the summer and fall, the Republicans were alerting us to the Arkansas Traveller as a wolf in sheep's clothing. He wasn't, they said, what he claimed to be – a new kind of Democrat, holding to a deep faith in the private sector. He would one day reveal himself as the old firm, a tax-and- spend New Dealer, and indeed he's done it. Not since the 1930s and Roosevelt's second New Deal, has there appeared a budget that hit everybody in one way or another and also in Roosevelt's phrase, soaked the rich. However, don't forget, in the American system, any presidential policy is what the president humbly suggests to Congress. Congress alone will say how much of it becomes law.

But there's something else I'd like to talk about, something that has gone from the news, it's already slightingly mentioned as one of the small, early hiccups in the Clinton presidency, but it has brought into the open a social predicament that afflicts several million young families and that Congress will have to do something about. I'm thinking of the very able, the beautiful and badgered lady, Mrs Zoë Baird whom President Clinton put up as attorney general and whom the Senate, though the appropriate committee, forced to withdraw.

Let's go over the simple plot. Mrs Baird is a corporation lawyer who drives 30 miles every day to work. Her husband is a law professor at Yale at New Haven, where they live. They have a small daughter who, for a couple of recent years was cared for by a Peruvian immigrant woman whose husband helped to run the house. Unfortunately both these immigrants, who were conscientious and able and well-paid, both were illegal immigrants. Mrs Baird admitted as much from the beginning and said over and over again before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in public hearings, that she was sorry, she'd done wrong. She'd done wrong twice. She had not alas, paid the necessary social security taxes for the couple. Once President Clinton nominated her for attorney general, she'd paid the taxes and an entailed penalty.

Well, an awkward fact which has been emphasised in commentaries since the hearings is that 55% of all young American women with children work and the married ones have a husband who works too. Who takes care of the child, the children? It's of course become a daily problem in every Western nation and in this one there is no national system. Then there's no national system of education, banking – many such things are left by the Constitution to the states. However, there are federal immigration laws and social security is a national system.

So in any state it is illegal to hire immigrants who've not got proper documents of entry. It's also illegal for the employer not to pay social security taxes for the hired help and, as I've said, Mrs Baird herself was illegal on both counts. Unhappily she was so badgered by the Committee over this issue that she withdrew her name and we look, later on, into why she was badgered.

The Judiciary Committee hearings were, of course, on national television and when she went you can guess there was a collective sigh from coast to coast, of couples, especially professional couples, who had similarly sinned. After all there are something between seven and nine million illegal immigrants in this country and very many, perhaps most, don't just lie about, they want jobs, they haunt agencies and lie or haunt street corners and don't lie and make themselves available for any going job at whatever the random employer decides is the going price. In fact, many of the best immigrants, decent, desperate people, eager to improve on a wretched life in their homeland, are all the more able to get sweatshop jobs from unscrupulous small businessmen or household jobs from scrupulous working couples, because they can be bought cheap. After Mrs Baird went, most of us, I'm sure, wondered just what was the domestic situation with the senators who had sat in such lofty judgement over her and not only that committee, how about the 100 senators, the 435 members of the House, did they all know and observe the legal obligations in babysitting?

The New York times had the wit and the responsible impulse to do one big piece on the various childcare systems available in Europe. Mrs Clinton, by the way, went and studied four years ago, the highly successful French system. And the Times did another big piece, just the one we'd been waiting for by polling the entire Senate and House of Representatives. Of the 100 senators, 98 said they had never employed illegal aliens since a new federal immigration law was passed in 1986. Only two senators admitted not paying social security taxes. Of the 435 congressmen, congress persons, if you must, 415 said they were blameless, 10 didn't reply, seven refused to answer on the nice ground that they never responded to surveys.

Well it's a relief to know that our malicious suspicions about the Congress were ill-founded. But there remain many thousands of professional couples who must still retain a twinge of guilt for hiring immigrants, not marching around with placards proclaiming their illegality, who are willing and good. A collateral fact which tends to smother the determination to be legal, is that Latino couples and Asian couples are conspicuously good with children. So it was with the Baird couple. The good outcome from the sad Baird case is heavy and widespread pressure on Congress to look at other national systems and begin to work on one for this country.

Now I mentioned that we'd look into the reason why Mrs Baird had to withdraw, because it reveals something, a populist trend, that is exploding around the country, that could have dramatic, if not profound effects on, well on the practice of American democracy. I thought at the first hearing of the senate committee, that it was carrying on too long, protesting too much about its deep, ethical concern for Mrs Baird's strict observance of the law. My hunch at that point was that they'd talked the thing over in private with her, which they had and told her that for their reputation's sake, they'd have to make a big thing of it, in the public hearings, but not to worry, she would survive. I'm sure that's what happened.

But during the hearings, when the committee had finally moved on to more germane questions of eligibility, something else suddenly happened. A statement, an interruption almost, by one senator, which turned out to be fatal. I could never recall its happening before. One of the men on the committee, a Midwestern senator and a Democrat and plainly you would have said, sympathetic from the start to Mrs Baird, he left the meeting for some minutes, he came back and he said, I paraphrase, I'm afraid I have to tell you, Mrs Baird, that my office this morning alone has received over 80 telephone calls, only two of them are in your favour.

Now this is extraordinary. A Senate Committee sits there in dignity and great power. They don't need to tap the people for an opinion, a judgement. But before that hearing was out, at least four senators reported, I mean face to face, with the witness, that the phone calls were massively, overwhelmingly against her. So I'm also pretty sure that backstage, during recess, Mrs Baird was told that this huge public outcry was totally unexpected and the senators on the committee, for their own political health, daren't support her. Anyway, she withdrew, rejected not by the Senate, blackballed by phone-ins.

The voice of the people had replaced the prerogative of the Congress. But what sort of people? They are usually the people who phone in, I find, they're people who get angry, people who are against something, hence the heavy imbalance of callers who were against Mrs Baird. President Clinton has decided, for now, to hold fewer press conferences and more phone-ins. He started it the other evening, standing in front of a studio audience, ready for all callers from all around the country. And a week or two ago, that old television evangelist, the very smooth and amiable Reverend Pat Robertson, who ran for president four years ago, remember, he did a television talk about homosexuals in the armed services. He's against them. He gently, but firmly, urged his audience to phone to their senators and congressmen their opinion … 500 thousand people phoned in, who are against homosexuals in the army. This new habit of encouraging phone calls will not be lost on any politician.

Twenty years ago exactly, a favourite journalist of mine deplored the avalanche of telegrams that descended on the White House from "the people", demanding the resignation of President Nixon over Watergate. My columnist said this was not a popular extension of democracy, it was a defiance of it. Forget telegrams and phone calls, let the people's representatives in Congress, if they are so disposed, go through the constitutional process, which is impeachment and that, of course, is what happened. But now, this week, the morning after the president presented his economic plan, a Republican congressman, who wisely didn't want to be identified, reported to a newspaper that the telephone calls into his office were running 50 to 1 against the president. How could this be proved. Who are the 50 and who the one?

On Friday morning the first national poll was out and it recorded a very different voice of democracy, from a larger sample. An astonishing 79% of the country, from chairman of the board to truck drivers and hamburger flippers, said that change in government was essential and that it the tax hit affected everybody, they were willing to do their share.

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