“Obama didn’t get it, because he grew up in Hawaii, where everybody has to get along. Pelosi, Schroeder told me, was not one of the in-denial Democrats: “She got it right away,” Schroeder said. Obviously, that was, unfortunately, true.” “I thought, these people don’t understand what’s really happening. “Most of the Democrats were like, ‘Nah, this is just a fluke, we’ll be back, everyone loves us,’” said Schroeder, who left Congress shortly thereafter, declining to run for re-election in 1996. But many of Schroeder’s colleagues were in denial at the time. Gingrich’s 1994 Republican revolution ended the congressional majority Democrats had enjoyed for decades and permanently changed the tenor of the institution. After it led to a first-ever congressional reprimand of a House Speaker, Gingrich said he regretted not having taken her seriously. As her Associated Press obituary recounts, an ethics complaint Schroeder and others filed against then-Speaker Newt Gingrich was initially decried as a silly partisan ploy. Men sometimes dismissed Schroeder at their peril. I don’t know-they didn’t invite us.” She was often accused of having been elected to Congress under false pretenses by voters who thought “Pat Schroeder” was a man’s name. “A lot of lobbyists on the Hill would invite the guys over for drinks,” Schroeder said. “There were just no women at all.” When congressmen socialized with women, it was not, shall we say, as peers. “There were no women pages, no women police officers, no women parliamentarians, no women doorkeepers,” she told me. It wasn’t just the lack of women lawmakers that made Congress in those days feel like “an overaged frat house,” as Schroeder once termed it. Usually we were asked to go get coffee or something.” (Pelosi, in a statement Tuesday, said, “It was my great personal privilege to serve with Congresswoman Schroeder, whom many of us consider one of the bravest women to ever serve in the halls of Congress.”) “She came and met with all the congresswomen, and wanted to know what we thought should happen at the convention,” Schroeder recalled. Then a housewife and political volunteer, Pelosi played a key role in bringing the 1984 Democratic convention to San Francisco. Schroeder told me she was a big fan of Pelosi, whom she met in 1984, three years before Pelosi ran for Congress. Read More: Pat Schroeder On Women’s Rights and Donald Trump. event as “Millie O’Neill’s husband.” His habit soon changed. ![]() ![]() When then-Speaker Tip O’Neill wouldn’t stop introducing Schroeder by recounting her husband’s accomplishments, she finally introduced him at a D.C. She once told the Pentagon officials testifying before her in a committee hearing that if they were women they’d always be pregnant, because they never said no. In Congress, Schroeder was famed for her barbed tongue and pungent wit. When I was growing up outside Denver, Schroeder, who represented the city in the House for 24 years, was liberals’ great champion in an otherwise red state. Talking with her was one of the highlights of my research. Schroeder, who died Monday at 82, told me this story when I interviewed her, nearly four years ago, for my 2020 biography of Nancy Pelosi. “We said, ‘I understand about your word, but we’re not in the gym.’” “This did not please us,” Schroeder told me dryly. In the Senate gym, where women had only recently been allowed, Biden had promised a fellow senator, Republican Jack Danforth of Missouri, that he would not hold hearings on the allegations. “Biden said to us, ‘You don’t understand-the only thing you have around here is your word, and I gave my word that this wouldn’t happen,’” she recalled. When they confronted Biden, he was none too pleased with their presumptuousness, Schroeder told me. They marched over to the other side of the Capitol to demand the Senate hear from Anita Hill, one of Thomas’s accusers. And so one day Schroeder and a few of her female colleagues in the House decided to do something about it. They were fast-tracking Thomas’s nomination and didn’t even plan to hear testimony on allegations Thomas had sexually harassed underlings. Joe Biden of Delaware, didn’t seem to share Schroeder’s alarm. “He was totally arrogant, telling us how equal rights was the silliest thing he’d ever heard-even though he was head of the EEOC!” Schroeder recalled when I spoke with her, in 2019.īut the Democrats on the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired at the time by Sen. In testimony before the Post Office and Civil Service subcommittee that Schroeder co-chaired, Thomas had seemed dismissive of the agency’s very mission. Schroeder, a liberal Democrat from Colorado, knew Thomas from his prior work as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. When Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1991, Congresswoman Pat Schroeder was immediately alarmed.
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