Off the Record

A Woman Scorned. Normally the nonvoting representative for the District of Columbia doesn’t get much ink, but these days Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton is everywhere. The reason? She is leading the charge of the black establishment against Clarence Thomas. But a source tells Cato that the buzz at the recent meeting of the Urban League was that she is carrying water for the feminists, trying to shoot down a perfectly decent black judge over the issue of unrestricted abortion.

A little history is in order here. Mrs. Norton was Judge Thomas’s predecessor at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The lone GOP member of the Black Caucus, Representative Gary Franks (R., Conn.), recently released a “Before Thomas and After Thomas” report laying out the record of Thomas’s accomplishments at the EEOC—including praise from such non-Republican groups as the General Accounting Office and the Washington Post. If even the judge’s harshest critics concede that he turned the EEOC around, it doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to deduce who left it in such a mess.

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Religious Persecution

A Woman Scorned. Normally the nonvoting representative for the District of Columbia doesn’t get much ink, but these days Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton is everywhere. The reason? She is leading the charge of the black establishment against Clarence Thomas. But a source tells Cato that the buzz at the recent meeting of the Urban League was that she is carrying water for the feminists, trying to shoot down a perfectly decent black judge over the issue of unrestricted abortion.

A little history is in order here. Mrs. Norton was Judge Thomas’s predecessor at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The lone GOP member of the Black Caucus, Representative Gary Franks (R., Conn.), recently released a “Before Thomas and After Thomas” report laying out the record of Thomas’s accomplishments at the EEOC—including praise from such non-Republican groups as the General Accounting Office and the Washington Post. If even the judge’s harshest critics concede that he turned the EEOC around, it doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to deduce who left it in such a mess.