Word: bairds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...millions of Americans who hire even occasional household help, the rules that tripped up Zoe Baird can be the laws from hell. The requirement that immigrants have U.S. working papers is just part of the problem. The real burden for people hiring anyone, from nannies and baby-sitters to once-a-week household help, for more than $50 in a three-month period is the taxes and the blizzard of paperwork that also come through the door. So stringent are the legal requirements that the Internal Revenue Service estimates that no more than one-quarter of American families with household...
...turned out that Bill Clinton had something to learn. For the first half of the week, as the new President prayed and played and paraded and swore his oath of office, his nomination of Zoe Baird as Attorney General seemed nearly as secure as those of the rest of his Cabinet, stars and hacks alike. She had freely admitted hiring undocumented workers, to both Administration officials and Senators who were questioning her, and they had generally brushed it off as "an honest mistake." But within 72 hours, her nomination was unsalvageable, and she became the first U.S. Cabinet nominee...
...middle of Baird's ordeal, Clinton awoke on a bright, glassy morning and embraced a quarter of a million people. He had promised upon his nomination that he stood for the people who paid their taxes and played by the rules, and he vowed upon his Inauguration "to reform our politics so that power and privilege no longer shout down the voice of the people." Before the day was over, it was the people who were shouting about something that outraged them, and by the end of the week the message finally got through...
Americans for the most part are enormously forgiving of wealth, remarkably tolerant of the gap between the rich and the poor in this country. But they reserve a special contempt for rich people who cheat. Outside Washington, the Baird story came across as an issue of people who play by the rules vs. those who don't and get away with it. Baird's story of the difficulty of finding safe, reliable child care might have won her the sympathy of millions of parents who face the same predicament. But when a couple with a net worth of more than...
...Dianne Feinstein, who owed their election in some measure to her. Here sat some of the same members who had been lambasted for their handling of Hill, eager for the chance to display their elaborate courtesy and newfound sensitivity. Here was Hill's chief tormentor, Orrin Hatch, praising Baird's competence, her record as a corporate lawyer, knowing full well that for his conservative purposes Baird was the best candidate he could hope for, and if he saved her job she owed...