Yesterday, former acting Attorney General Sally Yates testified in front of the Senate Judiciary committee that former National Security Advisor Michael T. Flynn had been compromised by Russian correspondence. However, she told the White House weeks before the White House made the decision to fire Flynn.
Yates gained national name recognition when she told the Justice department to not enforce the Trump administration’s travel ban, or, largely nicknamed, the Muslim ban. Yates was appointed to Deputy Attorney General by President Barack Obama, and just ten days after President Trump took office, she was fired.
Images of a professionally dressed middle-aged woman, sitting behind a folded paper name tag, and at a giant wooden desk stick in my mind. Congressional hearings go largely unanticipated by the public, but it seems to me that the women behind that desk make bigger impressions. Yates was composed and confident in her hearing, but if you are a woman testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary committee, you have to be.
Yates testified attentively for three hours without any slips. Other officials have to testify in front of Congress too, but I argue are less scrutinized than women of either party. Men’s questions are trivial; their answers are seen as affirmative. For example, Justice Neil Gorsuch, the United States Supreme Court nominee at the time, was asked by Senator Jeff Flake if he would prefer to fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck. His answer, which he fumbled over, did not seem to make any waves. In comparison, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was largely mocked (maybe rightly so) when she suggested rural schools may need guns to fight off Grizzly bears.
In October of 2016, Hillary Clinton testified for a House committee for over eleven hours. Just a year prior, president of Planned Parenthood Cecile Richards testified in front of Congress about the funding for the healthcare provider. Richards was extensively questioned about her salary, which is not topical of those hearings. She was also accused of being a criminal by a Republican lawmaker from Tennessee. Her hearing was more of a battle, a public martyrdom, than an oversighting hearing.
My point is that increasingly, women are called up to bat not only for themselves, but for their organizations and for the integrity of American democracy. These women, sitting behind the dark-stained desks, are framed below a committee that sits around them on a bench. With only 21 women in the Senate, those committees are overwhelmingly men. In fact, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell just formed a new committee to focus on healthcare reform. This committee of thirteen senators does not include one woman.
In a system where women are underrepresented, it seems the way they push for progress is through congressional hearings. Not only do these women’s voices permeate through the chamber, they are validated across the country by the women who see them behind those dark-stained desks. Yates’s testimony was celebrated on the Internet, particularly after her biting response to Senator Ted Cruz who attempted to question her authority in the executive order rollout. As I watched the hearing Monday evening, there was one phrase that ringed around Yates. “Nevertheless, she persisted.”