unknown world view. and bhi it s not just that we don t know where he stands on geopolitical matters, but there hasn t been a full dive of what he s even said to begin with. judging from how the trump campaign operated with respect to research and data, i m not sure that they ve done their due diligence to look for those statements. so in addition to maybe some nefarious tax dealings that may trip up tillerson, he may have said something in the past at some point in time that may not be just offensive to democrats but to republican nay sayers who will hit those phones like they did for zoe baird. one of the things with zoe baird, the problems she ran into were completely unimagined at any point prior to that. so i don t know. i m talking about with tillerson there could be some new thing that is the 21st century version of zoe baird that none of us thought of that suddenly becomes relevant. i want to listen to what john
hearing room to discover that every seat in the hearing room, audience seat, every seat, had been covered with a piece of paper that claimed the cabinet nominee who would testify that day was gay. luckily, washington had evolved to the point where that didn t slow down the confirmation process for that nominee. but that same week there was an explosion in the senate confirmation process, unlike anything we had ever seen, and it changed everything. for every single nominee who has come before the senate since that week. that is when from out of nowhere, the zoe baird problem emerged. that s what it s called, the zoe baird problem. it is named after the nominee who first got in trouble for
the senate without any republican votes. but the southern democrats, and yes, there used to be southern democrats in those days, the southern democrats turned against her first, and soon she had less than 50 supportive senators. then bill clinton nominated another working mother, kemba wood. she ran into a similar problem as zoe baird. kemba wood had employed a nanny who was undocumented. judge wood had paid the social security taxes for that nanny. but bill clinton had to withdraw kemba wood s nomination too, before she even had a hearing then, president clinton turned to the never married and childless janet reno as the woman who would become the first woman confirmed as attorney general. rex tillerson is the same age as zoe baird. he has four children and is more than rich enough to have afforded some domestic help when his children were growing up in
something that truly thousands of nominees before her were guilty of. not paying social security taxes for domestic help. in this case, a nanny. most americans had no idea you were supposed to pay social security taxes for nannies and people working in your home. zoe baird was a 40-year-old corporate lawyer who bill clinton had nominated, she employed a nanny who was not in the country legally but whom zoe baird said was sponsoring for legal status. she believed that because she was sponsoring the woman for legal status that it was legal to employee her while she was sponsoring her. she was wrong about that. zoe baird also believed that because the woman did not yet have legal status, she could not pay social security taxes for the woman, and she was wrong about that. she explained all of this to bill clinton before bill clinton nominated her.