Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Saturday that Republican leadership will try to recruit female senators to join the Judiciary Committee going forward.…
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Saturday that Republican leadership will try to recruit female senators to join the Judiciary Committee going forward.
« We’ve encouraged several of our women senators to go on the committee and I intended to do that again at the beginning of the next session, » McConnell told reporters.
He added that « there’s been no effort » to have all 11 GOP spots on the committee be held by male senators, but said his previous encouragement for female senators to join the panel was met « obviously without success. »
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McConnell’s comments come after the GOP caucus faced criticism when Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, his first accuser, testified before the Judiciary Committee last week.
Republicans brought in a female outside counsel to question Ford, a move that allowed them to avoid having 11 male Republican senators questioning her about her allegations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh from the 1980s.
The optics drew comparisons to the 1991 hearing when Anita Hill testified before an all-male Judiciary Committee about her allegations of sexual harassment against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.
The backlash from those hearings helped spark the 1992 « Year of the Woman » movement, when four women – all Democrats – were elected to the Senate in a single year.
McConnell’s comments also came a day after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, came under fire for his comments about women serving on the Senate panel.
“It’s a lot of work — maybe they don’t want to do it,” Grassley said Friday . “My chief of staff of 33 years tells me we’ve tried to recruit women and we couldn’t get the job done.”
Grassley told Fox’s Dana Perino on Saturday that his remarks had been misunderstood by Democrats, who ripped his comments on social media.
« What I should have done, in one sentence I should have said [that] we even have a hard time getting men to serve on this committee, » Grassley said Saturday.
