Last Saturday night, I appeared on the Justice with Jeanine Pirro show on Fox. It was maybe my 30 appearance representing liberals, and it was my worst. I was terrible. Judge Pirro asked me a question that I didn’t know was coming:
What specifically did Hillary Clinton actually accomplish in the Senate for women?
I had prepared for a dozen topics, but not this one. In this situation, you’re supposed to pivot and shimmy, but I didn’t. I stammered. I blinked. If you’ve ever fallen apart on live, national TV, you know it does two things: keeps you awake and validates the trolls. More importantly, my terrible four minutes bolstered the opinion held by Pirro’s viewers that Hillary Clinton has achieved nothing.
The argument lobbed at me on Saturday night was simple: Hillary Clinton’s name appears on just three laws, each of which are akin to renaming a post office after a famous person; therefore, she accomplished nothing as a senator.
Unfortunately, even afterwards, I couldn’t come up with that perfect answer that you always get when the argument is over. So, I decided to answer, for myself, what Hillary Clinton did in the Senate. I spent the last few days in a deep dive through Hillary Clinton’s actual legislative record in the Senate.
Here’s the bottom line: She accomplished an enormous amount, for women and for men, boys and girls. She worked on real problems, applied real solutions and got real results. I was stunned by the breadth of her proposals and achievements. Below are some of the things she worked on, led on and pushed on that made it into law.
Accomplishments of Hillary Clinton as a Senator
Let me be clear: In the Illinois primary, I voted for Bernie Sanders. Though I admired Hillary Clinton, some things she has done or said or failed to do made me suspicious: her vote for the bankruptcy “reform” bill; her support for Libyan regime change; her praise of Nancy Reagan’s HIV/AIDS record; her inability to seduce the electorate.
But, now I’ve seen the slow boring of hard boards evident in the 635 bills she sponsored (not to mention the 2,441 bills she co-sponsored). Her bills were proposals – arguments - that were progressive, sensible and intriguing. The ones that haven’t become law yet are just as terrific as the ones that did. For example, bills to create and fund rural entrepreneurship programs, rural broadband installation, urban startup incubators, food stamp benefit expansion and testing of the obscene backlog of rape kits. That was not the legislative record of a neophyte, of a corrupt toady, of a tribeswoman or a sociopath.
She not only pitched well-developed proposals, she collaborated to give them life. Her work was good and noble and obviously grounded in a preference to help people rather than weaponize elites. Consider what she got into law: taking care of soldiers and their families; demanding the truth about the dangerous air at Ground Zero and how it would affect people; sending support for a mother caring for a disabled child; busting through a new wall built to separate women from justice for wage discrimination; and forcing drug companies to protect kids from medicine not made for their bodies.
Senator Clinton’s roster of proposals shows us someone totally different than the craven hostage of big business of the left or the rabid, flighty diva of the right. Her legislative work reveals someone dogged, smart, concerned and humane; ambitious for success as a maker of policy. Viewed through a prism of history, Hillary Clinton’s legislative record reveals a woman who has trawled through the gloopy sludge of defamation – for 25 years - still devoted to making life better for people she may never meet, who may pray for her demise or her incarceration, who may curse her name and will her ill, but whom she sees and works to help. Now, having done some homework, I see a president.
